bithead redux

So, if you check out the Ars Technica page about their joint party with Gizmodo, you’ll notice a big guy with his mouth open pretty much dominating the foreground in the first picture (the crowd picture).

That’s me.

Yeah, I wish my mouth wasn’t open, and I wish I was another 40 pounds lighter, but damn, I’m in Ars.

If you follow my twitter stream at all, you know I went to WWDC this year.

I’ve been wanting to go for years. I find it hard to control the enthusiasm I had for the experience.

It was a good challenge to get through. I was around very smart people. I was at a technical conference that actually gave me more interesting technical information than I could take in. I swear, stuff was bouncing off of my brain during the Friday sessions. I knew the stuff was important, I knew the whys and the hows, but the what’s just ricocheted right off of my grey matter.

One of the things that I really want to write about is that how I feel like I’m finally coming back home to Smalltalk. One by one the things I miss are being incorporated into Objective-C. ObjC 2.0 was cool, [redacted] is going to be better. It is unfortunate that the details that make me happy about [redacted] are covered by NDA.

Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL are mentioned on Apple’s public pages, so I can actually mention them. Grand Central Dispatch is tied directly to the technology I tried to allude to in the previous paragraph, so perhaps soon someone else will mention it and I can stop being annoyingly coy about it.

I still use languages like Python and Ruby, but I’m finding myself drawn more to coding directly in ObjC and Cocoa, or perhaps Nu. I’m in a period of my programming life that I want a language that can go really high level and really low level, sometimes in the space of the same method.

The best thing about WWDC08? It brought me back into a technical area that is new and vibrant, one that inspires real excitement for me. It’s almost like I’ve had to spend years trying to downplay the fact that deep down inside, I just prefer the way that Apple does things, and I have for a very long time.

It feels very good to come home.

WWDC08. I’m going, finally. Woohoo!

rsync. I’m trying to get close to a terabyte of assorted data under control.

Nickel Creek. It started small — I heard “The Smoothie Song” on the radio and bought their Greatest Hits album. I have now succumbed to the inevitable and purchased all three of their regular releases. Oh, and the iTunes exclusive session.

Tempest. I’m still obsessing about it — perhaps I will finally bring the machine into work.

MAME. The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is something that I keep coming back to, over and over. I won’t tell you where I got the ROMs, though.

Mac Development in general. Yeah, still in love.

Git. Of the new source control systems out there, I seem to like it the best.

Bakery Nouveau. I didn’t think I cared if the croissants were flaky and delicate, but now I do. You heard it here first, the best cinnamon rolls in the world can be found in this little bakery in the West Seattle junction.

30 Rock. While I watched data fly across my network as I tried to get things back to normal, I watched all of season 2 of 30 Rock on Hulu. I already have a crush on Tina Fey, this just made it worse. 30 Rock manages to be incredibly funny, and yet not mean. I didn’t need more television to watch, dammit.

How I Met Your Mother. I love pretty much everyone in this show.

Back to work now.

I had a friend that loved to go to pawn shops. He was always looking for that amazing deal. He never knew exactly what he was looking for, but he always seemed to find some good stuff.

I went with him one afternoon, to see what the fuss was.

In the first shop we went to, over in the corner, was this pristine Tempest machine. It was plugged in and turned on. Other than a small power supply glitch and some misalignments in the monitor, the machine was perfect. I played a few games, verified that the rotary encoder was working well, and went to talk to the shop owner.

“How much for the Tempest machine over there?”

“I don’t know, what do you think is fair?”

I didn’t really know what was fair, and I didn’t want to name a price.

“I’ve never bought one of these machines before, I have no idea.”

He went away for about 5 minutes. He came back and said “How does $200 sound?”

I wrote a check right then and there.

It had just arrived in the pawn shop, and the law says that it has to be in the shop for 30 days so that they can figure out whether or not it was stolen, so I had to wait a month.

Finally a month goes by, and we get to take the machine home. We plugged it in and turned it on. It was beautiful. We fussed around with the little alignment knobs inside the machine until the display lined up. Other than some power supply hum that was leaking into the vector display, it was absolutely perfect.

I loved it.

I played that machine for hours. Eventually I got to the point that I could hit around 690,000 points on the default settings.

Interestingly enough, when I looked up the Twin Galaxies record for Tempest, I discovered that if I had recorded that game, or in some other way did it under refereed conditions, I would have the #7 score in the world. I knew I was decent, I didn’t realize I was world class.

So I guess I need to add “World Class Tempest Player” to my resume.

[so it seems that now that I'm including my twitter comments on the blog that some of this post is redundant -- twitter is one of the places where I form my ideas]

I graduated from High School in 1983. I was an arcade rat.

I was that kid that would stick my quarter on the machine while you were playing to claim the next game. I would stack up 4 quarters to lock it up for the next 4 games.

Yeah, I guess that could be seen as a dickish move, but it was the custom at my main arcade, a small arcade located next to the Safeway in Oak Harbor, the biggest town on Whidbey Island. I was from Coupeville, a tiny town south of there, 10 minutes away in my white VW Rabbit.

My favorite game was Tempest. I got good at it, and I felt that it was my duty to make sure that the top three scores on the list — the only scores that survived the machine being turned off — were mine.

At my arcade, we called that “owning” a machine.

I owned the Tempest machine.

I loved getting into a groove with the machine, running up a really good score with one man — so intense in my concentration that when I finally made a mistake and lost a man, it would shock me, and then I’d realize that there were 6-7 people behind me, watching me play.

I put a lot of money into that machine.

A Tempest machine is a bit of a temperamental machine. They had to be taken care of. I kept finding them in bars with unusable controls. Tempest uses a wheel, known as a “rotary encoder,” rather than a joystick. This was one of my favorite features — the control you can get with one is incredible. But Tempest machines in bars always had horrible wheels. When you spun them too quickly in one direction, your man would move in the opposite direction. This was always a recipe for a frustrating game. I usually walked away from those without finishing.

Eventually I just stopped trying, and didn’t play anymore.

More to come.