Someone Else's Final Frontier

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, creator of the popular B.C. comic strip, once quipped "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery and self-annihilation."

Earlier this year, President Barack Obama announced that he is scrapping the Constellation program, which was supposed to replace the aging space shuttle with a new orbital vehicle and return men to the moon by 2020, from which they might venture further out into the solar system. This move has caused some to speculate that the future of space exploration will not belong to America but to some other nation, very likely the Chinese.

In response, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, the last human being to walk on the moon, and Jim Lovell, one of three human beings who almost didn't make it back from the moon, wrote an open letter to the white house expressing their dismay. These are men who risked their lives in pursuit of a dream, only to see that dream shelved during their lifetimes.

We all understand that times are tough at the moment and the space program is expensive. Some might argue that the U.S. government, already mired in trillions of dollars in debt, can't afford to support a space program. Yet the Pentagon spends the estimated $108 billion that it would cost to return men to the moon by 2020 every three months or so. Obama has earmarked $600 million per year for the next five years for the design and manufacture of heavy-lift rockets required to send spacecrafts to Mars or the asteroids. Sounds good at first, until one realizes that that's about the same amount of money that it costs to purchase just four F-22 fighters. I suspect that the U.S. Air Force will likely be purchasing more than four F-22's per year over the next five years.

America never shone so brightly as she did during the Apollo years. The space program has given science invaluable new insights into the origin of the Earth, her moon and the solar system itself. It introduced new technologies and disciplines that have found useful applications outside the field of space exploration. It has subjugated no peoples and hardly killed anyone, with the exception of three unfortunate accidents. Unlike the shameful Abu Graib prison scandal and Wall Street's more recent financial implosion, the space program has done nothing to undermine America's international reputation. Quite to the contrary, the space program has been one of those American undertakings that the rest of the world has looked on with admiration. What a shame that, as Johnny Hart previously observed, America is once again forsaking her loftier dreams in favor of war, greed and short-sighted self-interest.

I'd suggest that Canada step forward, except that we'd probably just scrap the entire program and destroy all related materials after building the first five rockets.

The Genius Of Pac Man

Looking at my stat counter, I noticed that five people have been lead to this blog because they were Googling boomerang Formica counter tops. Perhaps boomerang Formica really is coming back! Who knew?

But that's not really what I wanted to blog about this week. This week I want to blog about video games (pause while all the non-geeks click on some other link)...

...I think that those of you who are still reading will agree that video games have evolved unbelievably over the past twenty years or so (pause while all the pimply-faced kids who think that first video game ever was called "World of Warcraft" click on some other link)...

It used to be that video games were of interest only to nerds like me. Let's face it, they were quite primitive in the early days. The color palette was often limited to four or six colors, low resolution images necessitated simple graphics with jagged edges and the sound effects were electronic and artificial. Back then, video games sounded like video games. Early games were often designed and developed by small teams of programmers (sometimes even a single individual).

Advances in technology have since turned video games into a serious industry. Today's games feature 3D high-resolution graphics with an almost infinite color palette. Digital sound and music make it hard to distinguish a computer game from a movie. Game development studios have budgets that rival Hollywood movie studios, and large teams including programmers, artists, designers, writers, sound technicians and, yes, even actors spend months or even years on big budget games.

So how come I don't seem to enjoy playing computer games as much as I used to? I don't spend near as much time with joystick in hand as I did in the eighties and nineties. Perhaps I've matured. Perhaps I've outgrown computer games. Perhaps the passage of years has sobered me and turned my thoughts to more serious priorities (pause again while I break down laughing until tears flow down my cheeks as I pound the floor with my fist). Yeah, right!

The truth of the matter is that modern games just don't excite me anymore. I've been trying to finish BioShock for months but every time I fire it up I play for maybe twenty minutes before I utter an apathetic "Meh!" and click the Quit Game button. It's not that BioShock is without its charm. Its weird, decaying aquatic art deco environment is interesting enough. The menacing Big Daddies provide a suitable challenge while the Little Sisters, the genetically mutated little girls that they protect, are downright creepy. But haven't we seen this before? In the end, isn't it just another "Shoot the Monster" game, albeit a fancy one?

It seems to me that the problem with modern games is that their developers focus too much on technical wizardry and forget about originality and game play. In the days of eight-bit processors and 16K storage capacities, game developers couldn't afford eye candy so they had to hook the player with innovative ideas and imaginative challenges.

Here's an idea for a game. There's this maze full of dots. In the maze is a round yellow "head" with a mouth that continuously opens and closes. It's not a person or a character or an animal; just a head represented as a plain yellow circle with a triangular opening for a mouth. It doesn't even have any eyes! The player moves this little head through the maze using a joystick. As the head passes over dots in the maze, it eats them up. The object is to eat all the dots in the maze. But then we'll put a bunch of little ghosts in the maze too. They float around the maze, chasing after the munching head, and if they touch the head the player loses a life. Oh but, get this! We'll put four big flashing dots at the corners of the maze and, if the munching head eats one of those, the ghosts turn a different color and then the munching head can eat them too, and you get bonus points for eating them. So then the ghosts all run away from the munching head but, after a few seconds, they turn back to normal and go after the munching head again. Oh! Oh! And every so often fruit appears in the maze and that's also worth bonus points if you eat it.

Sounds simplistic, doesn't it? What was the designer who came up with that idea smoking, and where can I get some? Who would have guessed that Pac Man would become the phenomenon that it did after it was first released back in the early eighties? If we analyze the game play, though, we begin to see that, as with chess, the rules and mechanics are simple, but there's a lot of subtlety that only becomes apparent when playing. When Pac Man eats one of the flashing dots and the ghosts become vulnerable, do you use the time to eat up the remaining dots in the maze in relative safety, or do you go after the ghosts and the extra points and then risk not being able to finish the maze? If you chase after a ghost, can you catch it before it switches back and eats you? Each successive ghost that you catch while they're vulnerable is worth more bonus points. How greedy are you? How far are you willing to push your luck? The game demands split-second decision making while testing your judgement and your nerve and that's what hooks you. It doesn't need 3D graphics or digital sound or a big development budget. It keeps you coming back with pure game play.

I'm waiting for the game with graphics and sound comparable to BioShock, but the originality and simple yet engrossing game play of Pac Man. That's a game that I want to play.

Tick... Tick... Tick...

This just in from a reliable source; namely a sixteen-year-old teenage girl who happens to be my daughter: Seems YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are considering pooling their resources to create the planet's Number One web site for on-line time wasters, tentatively to be called YouTwitFace.com. Until that happens, however, this blog remains the most expeditious way of frittering away your precious life seconds.

Boomerang Formica

The pattern that you see above is what I see underneath my cereal bowl as I douse my Shreddies with milk each morning. No, it's not the result of over-imbibing the night before, as evidenced by the fact that I was able to capture a photographic image of it. It's my kitchen counter top.

What I didn't realize, until recently, is that it has a name; boomerang Formica. The "boomerang" part of this interesting handle is an obvious allusion to the vague way in which the curvy little shapes resemble boomerangs, and the "Formica" part is owing to the fact that the laminate material upon which said curvy little shapes are printed is a heat-resistant, wipe-clean brand of composite materials manufactured by the Formica Corporation, based in Cincinatti, Ohio (according to Wikipedia). So, all in all, boomerang Formica is a very sensible moniker. "Amoeba Formica" would have been another possibility, but you don't want to associate the countertops upon which you prepare food with microsopic living organisms. I'd have to say that the marketing whizzes at Formica Corporation called this one right.

According to Jane and Michael Stern's Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (HarperCollins, 1992), patterns similar to this adorned the counter tops of homes and diners such as Al's back in the Happy Days, which gives you some idea how old my house is. It also gives you some idea how long it's been since any renovation or serious redecorating has been done (hint: not since before I moved into the place).

Boomerang Formica, say the Sterns, "signaled a forward-looking point of view, defiantly different from old, dowdy motifs such as the cabbage roses and Grecian urns" which embellish my bathroom walls and counter tops. That's me all over. Forward-looking but, unfortunately, riding in the caboose.

Wikipedia tells us that Formica was invented in 1912 by Daniel J. O'Conor and Herbert A. Faber, who worked for Westinghouse at the time. Before then, the word "formica" was used only in reference to a particular genus of ants (again according to Wikipedia), which would explain why my kitchen counters are overrun with ants each summer. I'm not sure how O'Conor and Faber were able to foresee this, but it all begins to make sense now. The ants probably follow the boomerangs, assuming that they point the way to the food.

Sadly, the heady days when counter tops such as the one in my kitchen exuded optimism and alluded to a "sleek, curved and speedy" future have faded into yesteryear. Now, say Jane and Michael Stern, "boomerang Formica is as nostalgic as doo-wop music and Brylcreemed hair". Well, I've admitted before on this blog that I have a weakness for nostalgia.

Okay, so my home is looking a little dated and I suppose I should really redo my kitchen counter tops. On the other hand, some styles are cyclical. If I hold out just a bit longer, maybe boomerang Formica will come back (Get it? Har! I kill me!)

The Light Bulb Stays On

The fourth annual Earth Hour is upon us. As I write this, several cities in the eastern hemisphere have already killed their lights for sixty minutes. My turn, here in southern Ontario, will come in about 9½ hours from the time of this writing. Except that my lights will not be going out.

What??? Heresy! Has the Halmanator no social conscience? He must be a climate change denier. Let the shunning begin! Out, demon! Out we say!

I am not a climate change denier. I believe that global warming is a real and immediate threat to humanity's future and I further believe that it's directly attributable to human activity on this planet. So why do I refuse to turn off my lights for an hour?

Because I see it as a meaningless gesture, that's why. Don't get me wrong. I understand the symbology behind the Earth Hour. I get the point. However, I don't see it accomplishing much, beyond making a point. Worse, the whole thing gradually seems to be taking on the characteristics of a social fad. We turn our lights out for an hour, we pat ourselves on our collective backs and then we go right back to our regular lifestyles, leaving lights on in empty rooms, leaving television sets on for no particular reason, driving our cars on short trips and errands for which we could walk or bicycle and idling their engines in long drive-through queues.

Want to help curb global warming? Leave your lights on today, but swap out all the regular incandescent light bulbs in your home for those curly-cue energy saving compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Have your furnace cleaned and serviced if it's been a while. At the very least, clean or change the filter. Lower your thermostat overnight or during the days if nobody's at home. Wash as much laundry as possible in cold water, and do full loads rather than partial ones. The same goes for your dishwasher loads. Heck, do the dishes by hand! You'll ultimately be doing the planet a whole lot more good by doing these things than you will by sitting in the dark for an hour.

Dropping the Ball Lange

I have a new certificate to add to my ever-growing collection of certificates of accomplishment. Yesterday, I completed a three-week job finding and self-marketing seminar with a human resources consulting firm called Ball Lange & Associates.

The program is funded by the Ontario government (so far), and I've found it to be invaluable. All aspects of job finding are covered including evaluating my goals and my personal work profile, résumé writing, interview skills as well as what resources are available and how best to use them.

The program's biggest focus is on tapping into the "hidden" job market; that is job openings that are never advertised. To that end, it focuses heavily on networking as well as researching and cold calling (sorry, "gold" calling) organizations. It is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all job vacancies are never advertised. That means that those who limit themselves to the classified ads and the internet job sites are limiting themselves to only 10 to 20 percent of the market.

So, for the past three weeks, I've spent seven hours a day, five days a week at the Ball Lange offices with a group of eleven other people, learning how to mine the job market more effectively, market myself more successfully, and basically working full time at looking for full time work. I had full use of their facilities (business directories, computers, internet, photocopiers, fax machines and phones) with the right to continue using the Ball Lange offices and facilities even after completing the program, and I even got 250 personal calling cards printed and a genuine Ball Lange coffee mug, all at no charge to me. Such a deal!

I estimate that this program has probably at least doubled my effectivity in looking for a new job to replace my previous, non-functioning one. That concurs with Ball Lange's statistics, which estimate that 75 percent of those who completed the program found work relative to their skills and experience (i.e. not asking "Would you like fries with that?") within three to six months of completing the program.

Okay, pop quiz, hot shot! You're the Ontario government. Your province is in a recession, so unemployment is high. You're funding a program that teaches invaluable job search skills and gets three out of four people who take the course off unemployment and back to work, happily paying taxes again. What do you do? Why, you cut the program's funding of course! That way, you not only put an end to a proven effective job search program, but you also shut down the organization that ran the program, thus putting all their people out of work as well, all in one fell swoop! On the bright side, at least those people know how to effectively look for new jobs.

That's right, as incredible as it may seem, the Ontario government has "changed their funding formula" for programs aimed at getting the unemployed back to work and, apparently, the new formula involves not giving any further funds to Ball Lange & Associates. Why? Because Ball Lange specializes in job search skills, but they don't do re-education or re-training, and the provincial government, in its wis-dumb, has decided they only want to fund organizations that do everything - you know, jacks of all trades, masters of none.

I have just two things to say about that. One, it's a bloody shame and, two, I'm sure glad I got in before Ball Lange & Associates close their doors in July. Three, (Three things! I have three things to say about that!), see you at the polls, Mr. McGuinty.

Free Software for Doctoring Photos

One web site which I check regularly (in fact, pretty much daily) is giveawayoftheday.com. They give away free software! The premise is pretty cool. Each day, a new title is offered. The titles offered aren't shareware, nor are they time-limited or feature-limited versions that you have to buy in order to fully enable. They are one hundred percent, fully functional programs that you can have for free and use for as long as you want.

The catch? You only have twenty-four hours to download and install them while they're being offered. After that, they won't install anymore. Once installed, they work just fine but, if you ever uninstall them for any reason, or upgrade to a new computer, you can't reinstall them. Still, I think this is an excellent way to evaluate software.

Unfortunately, the software offered is something of a mixed bag. Giveaway Of The Day has offered a few gems in their day, such as The Glary Utilities (a suite of system cleanup and optimization tools something like the better-known Norton Utilities, but cheaper) by Glarysoft, or AnVir Task Manager (a much more robust task manager than the one that comes standard with Windows that gives you much greater control over tasks, processes and services, flags suspicious or possibly malicious programs and even provides some rudimentary virus and spyware protection) by AnVir Software. I got both of these very useful programs from Giveaway Of The Day. However, the site has also offered a lot of software that adds very little to Windows' standard functionality or for which much better freeware alternatives already exist.

Sometimes, the software offered seems way too specialized. Take, for example, NoWires; an Adobe PhotoShop plugin for removing power lines from digital photographs. I kid you not. "Imagine you have photographed a beautiful sight. And there is only one ugly thing — electric wire crossing the picture," trumpets the web page that offers this plugin, "Get rid of this annoying wire using NoWires!" Boy, am I ever glad I found this thing! If I had a nickel for every time my photos were spoiled by unsightly power lines...

Okay, okay, I'll sop up the dripping sarcasm. Look, I'll grant that NoWires might prove useful if you have a lot of photographs that are marred by power lines but doesn't it seem just a little, well, overly-specialized? For one thing, it's a PhotoShop plugin so, if you happen to use a photo editor other than the very expensive PhotoShop, you're S.O.L. as they say. Besides that, PhotoShop is pricey for a reason. If you do happen to own it, I'm just sure it has its own tools for getting rid of unsightly power lines, not to mention any number of other unwanted items in your pictures. The individual who markets NoWires (and it does appear to be just some Russian guy by the name of Pavel Dovgalyuk) wants $29.95 for his plugin. Seems a bit steep for such a one-trick-pony bit of software.

A much better alternative is Inpaint, by Teorex, also previously offered by Giveaway Of The Day. Inpaint removes any kind of object from photographs; airplanes, cars, buildings, people, scratches, watermarks and, yes, even power lines. What's more, it's a stand-alone program, so you don't need PhotoShop or any other photo editor in order to use it. I've used it several times, so I can attest to the fact that it works nicely in most situations although, obviously, there are limitations. It works by extrapolating the background behind the object that you want removed so, obviously, you can't take out a building that fills 80 per cent of the picture. Also, the simpler the background, the better the results that you'll achieve.

A personal license for Inpaint (if you missed it on Giveaway Of The Day) is about ten bucks more than NoWires, at $39.99, but it's also much more flexible and, therefore, much more useful. If it sounds good, but you can't justify ponying up the cash, all is not lost. Giveaway Of The Day frequently does reruns, meaning that they may well offer Inpaint again at some future date.