David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I have just recently purchased an Xbox 360. I had owned Grand Theft Auto IV from when it came out and I bought it for betahouse, so I didn’t have many games. After seeing it showed off at GamerDNA a bit, I wanted to buy Braid.

Braid is a platform-like puzzle game, but to call it a platformer is like calling Myst an FPS. It does have side-scrolling action, and many of the creatures in the game take a serious nod to Mario Bros, and it works the phrase, “I’m sorry but the princess is in another castle” into the storyline quite well.

Braid is a time-manipulation puzzle game. Every map has a unique challenge, and an excessively unique solution. In some levels you can simply rewind time to correct your mistakes, in other levels some items react to you rewinding time but others do not, in other levels a shadow version of yourself completes actions that you had done prior to rewinding time. Overall it is simple, elegent, and mindblowing.

Braid is currently exclusively for Xbox360, although I see no reason that asides from licensing that it couldn’t hit the Wii, PS3 or PC in time. It isn’t excessively graphically demanding, although it is beautiful. The musical score is great, and the music plays off of your time manipulation. In one level there is the sound of a music box playing. As you walk left and right the music box goes forward and backwards.

Braid is only $15 on the xbox DLC. Some have complained of its high price compared to other DLC offerings. All I can say is that its well worth it. Braid and Geometry Wars 2 are the winners right now on the DLC and well worth their combined $35.

So this leaves us that Braid is likly the best puzzle game of the past 15 years. Myst was the one before that which totally blew my mind with its complexity, graphics and puzzle skills. Much of the puzzle genre is represented by casual games that don’t have any depth or brain power involved.

What is interesting, is that this game isn’t based on high powered hardware. Honestly, this is the game that Super Mario Bros, (or at least Super Mario World) could have been. We could have had this 20 years ago. Its like the Wikipedia in a way, in that it wasn’t the technology holding us back from having the product but simply the fact that it hadn’t been done yet.

Here is a video review that I found of the game and highlights aspects of its gameplay rather well:

Tags: 360, best, braid, dlc, game, myst, xbox

This morning Senator John McCain announced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate for his 2008 bid for the White House. This is an interesting tactical move, and it seems that the jury is still undecided whether it was a solid decision.

Few people saw this one coming. Of all of the qualified, eligible and likely candidates, she wasn’t really up there on the list. Many people assumed or guessed correctly that Biden would be chosen by Obama, but this was a shock to many.

Palin fits the bill as a fairly standard conservative republican candidate. She’s not really sitting close to the middle like Ron Paul, Giuliani or Schwarchenegger. She has commented that she prefers Obama’s energy policies in the past, but I’m guessing that such comments will be forgotten soon.

The real shock here– and the political ploy–is that she’s a woman. The key to the past few elections has been swing voters. Many women who were pushing for Hillary, partially because she was the first viable female candidate, will likely see Palin as a win. That percentage alone might swing things in McCain’s favor if things stay tight until November.

The main downside to Palin isn’t that she’s a woman of course, but rather is her shear inexperience. Compare her to Dick Cheney, Al Gore or Biden. She holds an undergraduate degree in journalisim with a minor in politics from a fairly middle of the road university, the University of Idaho. Cheney by comparison holds a Master’s degree and was working on his doctorial studies. Al Gore went to Harvard (only school he applied to) for his undergraduate studies, then to Vanderbildt for divinity. George HW Bush went to Yale and was a Skull and Crossbones member. Biden went to law school. Basically in comparison, her education is weak.

While I don’t see it as a “huge” thing, she has no military experience. This seems to be a huge thing for conservatives. Cheney didn’t go, but both Bushes and Gore had at least some experience in the armed forces. She instead was in beauty pagents, worked as a news reporter, and just in the past few years got into what likely amounts to small-town politics. Alaska isn’t a huge population. This isn’t the governor of NY or California here.

She only has less than two years of experience as a governor. McCain’s camp has been attacking Obama on the side of little experience (Obama has been a US Senator since 2005, and in the IL state senate since 1997). I simply don’t get it. It’s all a political ploy that might work, but I have my doubts.

Tags: election, mccain, obama, Palin, vote, woman

My boss suggested that I go to the Affiliate Summit Boston the other week, as he was out of town traveling. The primary function of my current job is to optimize our ad networks and provide strong reporting on them. My goal of going to the Affiliate Summit was to possibly learn something, and potentially find new partner networks to work with and to fill ad inventory. I was excited to go, so I threw on something decent looking and went down to the WTC/Seaport area in Boston.

I had called ahead to the Affiliate Summit to check to see if we had already purchased tickets, and if otherwise tickets were availible. It seemed that we hadn’t already purchased tickets, so I intended to buy an Expo pass. I am firmly against excessively overpriced events, but I’ll rant/blog about that more in another post.

I show up and registration is a mess. They have seemingly three places to register. There’s the “Self Checking”, “Self Registration” and a long line of booths with various registration functions person to person. I checked Twitter and was pleasantly shocked to find that many friends were attending that day including @mathurrell, @chrisbrogan and @pistachio. So far, so good.

However I get in line at the “Self Registration” line and I’m told promptly that the tickets are sold out. However I’m given hope and snubbed in the same sentence by being told to “wait for a determination”. So I wait. And I wait. And I wait. The registration people can’t even seem to make the printers work and are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Don’t get me wrong, I understand registration can be a mess, confusion and hectic. Yet this was worse than most.

People behind the desk keep asking if they can help me, then telling me that its sold out. I ask who we are waiting on for this “determination”. Is it a Fire Marshall regarding fire code? Union workers? Management? God? They don’t know. They just know that someone will tell them and that there is no one to ask. I think all in all I wait 45 minutes. I twitter a few times about how poorly organized this is.

I’m a bit shocked and feel even more snubbed in that I’m know by at least a dozen people here who are attending, speaking or whatever and getting completely ignored. Maybe I make too big of a deal of myself. If I’d have shown up to Podcamp without a registration, I feel pretty certain that Sooz would have let me in (it was ’sold out’ too). I know we did that for a few people at ROFLCon that were friends of the speakers, etc. If social media people are there I’m frankly shocked if I’m treated poorly at an event. Needless to say, this was the first event in over a year that I’d entered in Boston and hadn’t been treated well, or had someone know me.

I end up getting in, after paying the $300 Expo registration fee. I notice a “security” flaw in their Expo/Full pass system in that the Expo-Only passes are exactly the same, but just happen to say Expo at the top. The Full passes don’t have any text there and the paper is shorter. Basically to turn your $300 Expo pass into a full pass all you need is scissors. I don’t do this, but take note of the lack of thought put into this.

The security guys at the door are overly tweaky. Must be Union or something. There are two at every door and they always want to see both sides of your pass when going through. Whatever, but it just seems like a little bit much security for the event.

Then we get to the floor. Let me make this clear, 95% of the booths and companies there make lawyers and used car salesmen look honest and upright citizens. Affiliate marketing for the most part is full of people that basically just want free advertising on your website. They don’t care about CTR, they don’t care about your eCPM, they don’t care about what your users want. They have all sorts of made up marketing terms to describe what they are doing. Take “CP” and add a random letter to the end to make a new 3 letter descriptor. CPP, CPB, CPV, whatever. All they want is people to put crap on their sites and for 10 suckers out there to buy something from them. The Expo floor was crawling with these types.

They are all pushing insane amounts of booth swag. Some of it is just ODD. One company gives out condoms, shot glasses, and asprin. Some companies have minibars at their booths. One has a blackjack table. I’m fine with that and play my hand of blackjack, swap business cards, and have a drink. Nothing comes off as authentic. All of these people are fake. None of them believe in their companies, products or team.

The few that do come off as decent are from brands I know already and have understated booths with little to no swag. These happen to be Google and Amazon among others. The Amazon guy was actually super helpful and gave me a few good ideas and the Google guy passed along some neat things too. Commision Junction (even though we use their service and give them literally million of impressions a month) was a bit awkward and rude toward me, but maybe they were just overwhelmed.

I handed out a lot of cards to the least slimy people on the floor and made a few semi-decent connections. Many of them that I handed my card out of pity have been overly aggressive in contacting me. I don’t personally like that, as its simply not my style. I don’t like people that seem desperate and inauthentic all at once. I’d have responded well to a person-written email to me, but two form emails and then getting hounded on the phone isn’t my style. Sorry, nothxkbai.

I should comment also on the $8 hotdogs and $3 bottles of water that were being sold, but those seem to be the standard, “Poorly planned event that is screwed by the convention center” fare. I’m not opposed to paying a bit for a conference/event, but at least don’t screw me on the food. The Plone Conference in Naples was like $700USD and had fully catered (excellent) food for a week. For the $300 they could have at least sat out free bottles of water. Hell, Podcamp Boston had free drinks and it was $50.

I will say that I did find 3-4 decent looking programs that we are considering using now, so the thing wasn’t a total wash. None of these have turned out to be rockstars yet however. I think I did learn a bit, in that affiliate marketing isn’t worth it at all. Bloggers, if you’re thinking of doing ads just stick with Google Adsense instead. It will pay you more.

The blogger lounge was great and I did happen to see some people that I knew there. It was pretty much the best organized thing of the conference. There was a flatscreen with a Wii, seats, beer and chill people. Better and more authentic conversations were happening there and I learned more in that room then I did on the floor.

I’m not sure who in the world would have been really strongly benefitted from the people pushing stuff at the Affiliate Summit. Perhaps people that simply don’t care about their readerbase. Perhaps people that don’t know how to get decent CPM advertising going. Who knows. It wasn’t me.

Peter Jackson
64kbps

Technological innovations of the last few centuries have changed our relationship with Planet Earth. With fossil fuel supplies in decline, energy demand growing, and worrying climate change predictions, the future doesn’t look great. The presentation will start by briefly looking at the challenges that lie ahead. What can we as hackers, both individually and collectively, do to be more environmentally sustainable? How could we use our skills in the event of the situation reaching crisis point?

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This is part of a series of posts that I am making in order to create an RSS feed for The Last HOPE talks and other media in order to share and download the audio files easily with software such as iTunes. The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhatIsNoiseTheLastHope

Jens Ohlig
64kbps

How do you get a hacker space started? How do you manage it once you have a space? This talk presents wisdom collected over a decade of building sustainable hacker spaces in Germany. Through “design patterns,” Jens and Pylon will cover the essentials of assembling an initial group, finding the perfect location, and managing the community. Earlier versions of this talk have inspired the creation of the U.S. hacker spaces NYCResistor and HacDC. This version will inspire and help you create a hacker space where you live!

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This is part of a series of posts that I am making in order to create an RSS feed for The Last HOPE talks and other media in order to share and download the audio files easily with software such as iTunes. The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhatIsNoiseTheLastHope