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One more thing I'm not very good at

Donkey Kong:

Of all the classic arcade games I played as a kid the one I sucked at the most was hands down Donkey Kong. I was more an Asteroids and Galaga sort of guy (although I wasn't all that great at them, either). Donkey Kong was just too... too... well... let's just say that you have to have more coordination than a drunken rhino to be able to play it well. It ate my paltry allowance every freakin' time.

But I get the last laugh, Kong. The last laugh. It only took twenty-five years but now, through the magic of emulation and possible copyright violation, I (and you!) can play this maddeningly difficult game until we're blue in the face and don't have to leave broke!

Frustrated? Yes.

Broke? No.

If you want to play, go to emulator-zone.com and download a MAME port of your choosing. I'm currently using MAMEUI on the PC and MAME OS X on the Macs. Don't mess with the command line MAME as it's pretty fiddly and can harsh your 80's arcade nostalgia trip. If you really want to enhance the arcade ambiance go to arcade.hofle.com and download a soundtrack MP3 from the appropriate time period.

Once you've got your MAME software installed head on over to Germany. You'll know what to do once you get there.

After messing around with DK for a couple hours I've determined that even after twenty-five years I'm still no good at it. In fact, I think I'm worse! Maybe it's the carpal tunnel. Oh, well.

Fully automatic unintended consequences

The awful iPhone camera got me thinking seriously about buying a better camera. On a sort of whim I bought one of these babies at BestBuy for $179+tax:

It's a Canon SD790 IS fully automatic sub-compact camera:

• 10 megapixels
• Big, bright 3" LCD
• Optical Image Stabilizer (hence the 'IS' in the name)
• 3x optical zoom
• Up to ISO 1600
• Fully automatic point-n-shoot
• Super small

Its small size and light weight makes it extremely portable, which is a big plus for me. The larger or heavier a gadget is the more likely it is to be "forgotten" at home. You can throw this little job in your jacket pocket or fanny pack and it's like it's not even there. I was afraid the tiny size and lack of any sort of manual settings would be a drawback but I'm finding that it's not a problem. In fact, I really like this little camera.

Here are a few samples I took over the past few days:

Not too bad. Not bad at all. I love how it captured the play of light across the old Brigham City storage building in the middle pic. I just squatted down and waited for the sun to peak between the clouds. As soon as I clicked the shutter I knew I'd caught a decent picture because, well, it was right there on the LCD display.

And now for the "unintended consequences" I mentioned in the post title:

After going on a veritable shooting spree of hundreds of huge, high resolution ten megapixel images I realized that my iMac's hard drive was filling up! My already large iPhoto library had more than tripled in size in less than three days. I have a hunch that the $179 camera, which cost me less than half what my old Canon PowerShot A70 did, will ultimately drive me to purchase an expensive (and scary) internal hard drive replacement for the iMac and an even larger external backup drive.

Oh, well. I guess that's the cost of progress!

I hate to say it

but I think the put/call ratio is signaling another leg down in the US equities markets:

In the above chart I've plotted a four week exponential moving average of the weekly CBOE Put/Call Ratio ($CPC) against the S&P 500 ($SPX) going back for two years. Notice how each time the weekly $CPC dips below about 0.95 (horizontal yellow line) the S&P 500 usually peaks? And every time $CPC dips to an extreme of 0.90 or lower (horizontal red line) it always peaks? I drew vertical red lines on the charts to make it easier to see the relationships.

I won't pretend to understand why this works but so far, at least over the 2007/2008 bear market, it's got a pretty good track record. In the above chart there's only one instance (April of 2007) when it was dead wrong. And even then it seemed to forecast the period of crappy sideways trading over summer 2007.

iPhone camera ineptness

Yesterday we went snowshoeing out by lower Lake Mary. It was great fun but also hard work -- snowshoeing is TOUGH! Like always, I forgot the good camera at home and was left with only the camera in my first generation iPhone. I snapped a bunch of pics and thought it would be interesting to illustrate just how awful the built-in iPhone camera really is. Note that all of this was in bright afternoon sunlight with no clouds or anything.

Some look pretty good, especially when you take in to account it's coming from a phone camera:

but most were seriously underexposed, coming out looking like night shots taken under a full moon:

[ Except for shrinking them down for web viewing I left the brightness and color alone. ]

The second and third picture above of the boulderfield were taken at the same spot; I just pivoted about 20 degrees to the left hoping to be able to capture more of the scene.

I guess you can't expect too much from a device that's packing so much gadgetry into such a tiny package. Still, the autoexposure on this device leaves a lot to be desired. It pretty consistently chooses to underexpose by a wide margin. Granted, you can fix some of this in post but the dynamic range in these pics don't leave you much room. I'm finding that most are not salvageable.

Is it better than no camera at all? Yes. But not by much...

Just trying to help the kids

Plaxico Burress On Gun Safety:

Free air for the frozen bag lady

The University is on a snow day today due to a big winter storm last night. It looks like over a foot so far but it's melting really fast so it's kind of hard to tell just how much came down. Instead of hibernating in front of the TV or fooling around on the computer I decided to take OmegaMom's subtle suggestion to get out and take some pictures of the snow.

I thought about heading out to Lake Mary to see if there were any ducks around but the roads were a mess so I went in to the campus instead. The grounds crews had already cleared most of the snow off the roads and sidewalks so it was easy to get around. Because everything was closed it was really neat to have the whole campus almost to myself. Here's some pics:

The snow sculpture gave me a start; when I first saw her there I thought it was a frozen bag lady!

Waiting for the worms

Ever gotten a song stuck in your head and couldn't get it out? You know, you hear a stupid commercial jingle or a kids' song and then it starts endlessly repeating over and over inside your head. No matter what you do it just keeps going on and on until inexplicably, hours later, it stops. Well, it turns out that those maddening recursive tunes and the phenomena of replaying them endlessly in your head have a name: earworms and there's a research website devoted to them (click image or here to go there):

I'm really glad they don't actually have live examples of earworms on the site. That would probably be a disservice to site visitors because, like the big red button labeled "do not click this button" you know you'd have to listen.

The last time I got it bad was at Disney Land a couple years back with a friend. [Now there's a place for earworms; that place is the freakin' magic kingdom of earworms.] It was the theme song for the big Main Street USA parade and I got it really stuck. It was just a few lines of catchy lyrics and repetitive bass track and afterwards I was spinning that damned thing around and around for hours. It wasn't even the whole song because I couldn't remember the end -- which probably contributed to it getting stuck in the first place. If I'd been able to run the thing through to completion it probably wouldn't have infected me. The little bit that I could remember would run right back to the beginning, making an infinite recursive loop.

In Alfred Bester's SciFi classic The Demolished Man the lead character Ben Reich uses an earworm to defeat telepathic cops. Because the cops can read minds they instantaneously know when you've committed a crime. By purposely infecting himself with an earworm he was able to conceal his thoughts. Great book if you're into SciFi and proto-cyberpunk.

[ found via The Old New Thing blog ]

Flagstaff, AZ home supply chart for 12/2008

It's that time of the month again. Here, for your enjoyment, is the latest Flagstaff, AZ home supply and zillow price chart (click for larger version):

Supply down, price down. I added a 20-period moving average to the price (dotted line) to help smooth out some of the noise. According to the spreadsheet, prices have dropped 3% just in the past month alone. While not a large move it's at least a start.

Bank statement ads? WTF?

So I was just checking out my credit card statement and noticed that my card issuer had taken it upon themselves to insert ads inline along with my purchases. See the pic below for what I mean (click for non-blurry version):

They had conveniently placed ads for competing companies below two of my purchases at amazon.com and Office Max. Un-be-lievable!

Which bank is it? Well, I'll give you some clues: They recently went hat in hand to Congress for a bailout. Twice. And their name rhymes with the words pity, and shitty. I think you can figure it out from there.

Are things really so bad in the banking world that they feel the need to make a few cents whoring themselves out to e-commerce sites for click-throughs? What's next? Animated ads in the mall asking you how your new jeans are working out? Give me a break!

WWII in thirty seconds

It's a little rough around the edges, but I think they've about got the gist of it (click the picture for the larger animated GIF):

"o this fockin sucks i got a depression!"

It's original. It's funny. And I don't know who made it but if you're the author let me know in comments so I can attribute it to you.