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Yes, I owe you some longer blog posts. No, this is not one of them, but I need to get it out of my head. I warn you that this entry contains aesthetically offensive imagery and is not for the design-sensitive.

Muni is the public transport agency for the city of San Francisco, one of the most visually appealing and photogenic cities on the planet.

Muni's logo, as branded on most city buses, trolley buses, and trains, and which you consequently see about every five minutes in the city, is this:

Aaagh, my eyes!

So, if you go to San Francisco, be warned: it's a city that covers random surfaces with the design equivalent of goatse.

Picture the scene: near the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I am walking along the road back to our lodge about 20 minutes after watching a beautiful sunset. Two girls in their twenties are walking the other way. It is — this is important — almost dark. As we're passing, one of the girls asks me a question.

Girl, in strong Southern accent: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: (speechless for several seconds) ...What?
Girl, with identical intonation: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: Err... yes, the sun set about fifteen, twenty minutes ago.
Girl, loudly: Darn!
Me: ...Sorry.

I don't know which is more disappointing: that I couldn't think of a spontaneously funny response (like “yes, but if you go west really quickly, you can probably still catch it”, which came to me ten minutes later in true Treppenwitz style), or that this person will probably breed.

Technorati Tags: funny, holiday, stories

In America, I:

• Upgraded to First Class on a Virgin America flight and, for probably the only time, was in the first group of people on and off the plane.
• Ate Japanese food in the Sierra Nevada.
• With the rest of the audience, played like a kid with several kilometers of paper in the Blue Man Group show at the Venetian.
• Got up at 3am to get a bus to get a plane to get a coach. Ugh.
• Flew on a DHC-6 Twin Otter over the Grand Canyon as the sun rose over it.
• Stayed in a huge black glass pyramid with a balcony outside the door that looked out onto the world's largest atrium.
• Picked up John Hodgman's new book, three days ahead of the publication date.
• Shook the hand of Penn Jillette.
• Ate antelope.
• Climbed Sentinel Dome and experienced one of the most awesome, panoramic views I've ever seen.
• Drank my first pumpkin milkshake, which is only available at one place I know about, and then only seasonally. With extreme irritation, I discovered that it was by far the nicest milkshake I have ever tasted.
• Flew back over the Atlantic at the time the British clocks were put back, saving 12.5% of the jet lag. Unplanned, but quite a good idea in retrospect.

Photos are going up at roughly the rate of one a day on Flickr, and further reflections on the holiday to follow here.

Next: ten reasons why you should fly Virgin America at absolutely any opportunity.

Don't know when I'll be back again.

Slim to no chance of blogging for the next couple of weeks... I'm off to the US for my annual fleeting opportunity to stop thinking about work.

On the itinerary this time:

• San Francisco
• Las Vegas
• the Grand Canyon
• road-tripping from Vegas back to the Bay Area
• Yosemite
• Napa
• and, best of all, a burger at Taylor's Refresher

And who knows what else. I'm likely to post photos to Flickr while I'm there, but as I said, blogging will be thin on the ground (bah, and I was just getting the hang of it again).

(Because what the world needed most from me today was another Wacom pun...)

The new Bamboo Fun is (aptly) really fun to use. To get a feel for it, I made this:

I'll say it first: this is not a drawing, it's a trace. I started with a cool CC-licensed screenshot and imported it as a base layer in Photoshop, reducing the opacity to about 10% so I could faintly see it. Then I blocked in the shapes of the Pyro in a new layer above the screenshot with solid, flat colours.

I then removed the screenshot layer from the Photoshop image and, continuing to use the original image side-by-side as a reference, used lighten and darken brushes of various sizes to do all the shading, tidying up the colour outlines where I needed to.

It's not perfect -- the colours aren't right because I picked them by guesswork, and it's low-contrast compared to the source. And it's pretty sloppy if you look closely. But for a 90-minute sketch, I think I'm pretty satisfied.

Technorati Tags: games, graphics, graphics tablet, tf2

Just a quick note to explain how comment posting works, because it wasn't very intuitive in the new templates.

You don't need to sign in to post a comment. You can just fill in the name, email address (optional) and URL (optional) fields in the comment form and post that way. But your post may go into a moderation queue and have to be manually approved (this is not currently the case, but I'm keeping the possibility open in the future if there's a spamment problem).

Alternatively, you can click the 'Sign in' link above the comment form, and authenticate using credentials from LiveJournal, Vox, TypeKey, or any OpenID provider (including AOL, Blogger, Yahoo/Flickr, or WordPress). Chances are that you already have at least one of these accounts. Authentication's handled by the originating services in all of these cases, so you don't need to worry about my security setup.

The advantage to signing in is that if you're authenticated, I can then approve you as a trusted commenter, and your future comments will skip any moderation queue.

I've changed the wording on the comment form and hopefully that should clear it up.

After trying my broken graphics tablet on three machines with the same lack of detection, I decided to order a replacement, which showed up today.

Because the Wacom Graphire line has been discontinued, I went for a Bamboo Fun, which is from their new entry level line. It came down to a choice between that and the regular Bamboo, which seem to have the same internal hardware, but one is styled white and rounded and pitched at home users, and the other is black, shiny, and angular, and aimed at office use. They both look very sexy, and not at all like entry level hardware.

Unpacking the device was a lovely, Apple-like experience, and it's nice to see a company care about that stuff rather than putting everything in ugly, hard-to-open packaging (or, worse, blister packs). I know some people would disagree that packaging really matters, but I think when it's the difference between your first couple of minutes with a product being pleasant or frustrating, it's probably quite important.

And here's a picture of my old Graphire2 for comparison:

I haven't used the Bamboo much yet (that's next), but I've already determined that one advantage it has over my old Graphire is that it works.

Sorry, but tonight I got nothin'. In an uncharacteristic fit of creativeness I was all set to try some digital sketching, but when I broke out my old eBay-acquired Wacom tablet, there was something wrong with it. Annoying, since it worked fine a week ago.

The Wacom software in system preferences doesn't recognise that it's plugged in, and though it works in OS X, it does relative cursor movements like a mouse, rather than absolute positions like it's supposed to, making it useless. The Wacom knowledge base recommends deleting some preferences files, but I've done that and more, going as far as a complete driver reinstall, and nada.

The behaviour it's exhibiting is standard operating system graphics tablet stuff, and I've no idea why the installed Wacom driver isn't detecting its presence and handling it properly. Wish I knew if the tablet itself was at fault, because I really don't want to have to buy a new one — I don't use it much and those things aren't cheap.

You probably know the story, but I'm going to hit the main points quickly: EA released Spore. It got good reviews. People bought it. Some people were disappointed in the game, but also, many people hated the aggressive DRM.

Then it got interesting.

In what I believe to be the gaming community's first act of powerful and organised protest, gamers went to the game's page on amazon.com, and wrote genuine, well-justified and heartfelt one-star reviews focusing on the game's burdensome DRM and the lack of advance disclosure of its limitations. Breaking no rules, giving no grounds for Amazon to take down the reviews, coordinated but individually, gamers posted their opinions of the product in their own voices. Hundreds, then thousands of one-star reviews, completely eclipsing the small number of favourable ones.

Meanwhile, Spore was readily available on torrent sites, as it had been since several days before its street date. In other words, the game could have been released with no copy protection at all, and it would have made no difference to its availability on pirate trackers. Spore's DRM was oppressive only to paying customers. It was no inconvenience to a pirate.

Amazon is one of America's largest game retailers, and as most of the reviews remained (they did, fairly, take down obviously bogus ones, or those that broke rules), it became clear that they had no intention of censoring the opinions of customers. And as the days went by, it also became clear that EA could not wait this one out. They were losing business, and losing face. They would be forced to respond, and we all waited with interest to see what the response would be.

Might they possibly back down on DRM, acknowledging that their current arms race was not, in any sense, working, and salvaging a huge amount of goodwill from their customers? Or would their response be a reaffirmation of their continued commitment to DRM, even under intense pressure to do the opposite?

Here was their answer. Don't be fooled by RPS's uncharacteristically uncritical write-up (Walker, what the hell were you thinking?). The facts:

• Activation: still present.
• SecuROM: still present.
• Install limits: still present.
• Having to make a goddamn PHONE CALL when you run out of licenses, and being reliant on the competence and good faith of an organisation which is infamously incompetent and acts in notoriously poor faith: still necessary.

By handling it in the way that they have, they've succeeded in convincing some people that they've done us a big favour. But this was a token climbdown. The copy protection that they have stepped 'back' to is still extremely draconian, and a mere two to three years ago, would have been unthinkable on a game.

If you take one point away from this blog entry, make it this: EA's reaction to the Spore controversy is an unambiguous indication of their future intentions for DRM. They took two weeks to consider it — they made their choice carefully and, we must assume, with little chance that they will reconsider it again any time soon. This response is, without a doubt, a statement of the way things will be for the next couple of years at least. It is this, above all, that has made me angry.

So, as EA decided to escalate a war against piracy in which they have lost every single battle, a war which drives up development costs, and which has now dragged their paying customers into a world of undisclosed install limits and unreasonable demands, I've decided that I'm done with this fatuous company. I don't want their games enough to make the sacrifice they ask of me in order simply to play them. And it's bad enough to be treated like a pirate, but I'm damned if I'm going to be treated like an imbecile as well.

Gamers, we are so much smarter than this. I'm not going to ask anyone to join me in a boycott. That's everybody's individual decision and I'm not interested in advocacy. But here's my personal promise. I wholly reject EA's patronising, anti-consumer bullshit, and from right now until they remember how to treat customers respectfully, the few EA games I play will be borrowed, rented, or purchased second-hand. I will buy no games and no DLC from them, and EA will not see another penny of my money.

Handing $700 billion to Wall Street seems like such a wasted opportunity. Why not make them earn it? Here's an idea.

Get a glitzy studio and a charismatic host (Jon Stewart maybe?) to anchor an eight-hour television spectacular, say 6pm to 2am on one of the major networks. Scripted comedy bits, musical guests, etc. But the live feeds are the main attraction. Train long-lens TV cameras and sensitive directional microphones on several high skyscraper windows.

It is 6pm. The sun is starting to set over New York. Everyone in the US is glued to their television sets. The ghost of Don LaFontaine introduces the event as the lights come up, the orchestra swells, and the telethon begins.

There's a big, flashy counter on the set and constantly on screen in a lower third. This shows the current amount the US government will give to Wall Street. It starts at $0.

The host explains the premise: every time a board member or executive of a bank appears at one of the windows, they go live to that camera and capture that guy's final, emotional, potentially sincere apology to the world, followed (after a countdown from the studio audience) by their leap from the 40th floor window (with hilarious slide-whistle sound effect). For every suicide, the banks get $1bn in bailout.

Like all telethons, it will probably start slow, but eventually the banks will be practically pushing their executives out of windows for the money. The last hour will be chaos as they rush to beat the deadline.

The banks get their money. (If they're really good, they could even make a profit.) The public get something for their money. The government gets to make a meaningful trade. And a load of greedy, worthless imbeciles who caused the mess in the first place are removed from the gene pool. Everybody wins.

Or you could just, y'know, hand them $700bn. Come on, Congress, there's still time. Where's your sense of theatrics?