Doug’s World

Twitter Followers

May 22nd, 2009 2:50 pm Comments Off

The mosaic below is the avatars of my 187 Twitter followers as of today. It was created by Sxoop.

I was surprised at how many of them are faces I know. I sometimes forget who I’m ranting and raving to.

Where's Doug?

April 22nd, 2009 5:13 pm Leave a comment

Hmm, this place is getting pretty dusty. Dark, deserted, cobwebs everywhere. Downright creepy.

I guess, since it’s my blog, I should explain. Well, it’s like this …

I started having problems with Wordpress on this site a while back, as I’ve mentioned before. Many people couldn’t post a comment at all, and others could post but they’d get weird errors, and people I had already approved started getting put in the moderation queue, and so on. These are all great strategies for reducing blog traffic, and it worked like a charm in that regard.

Upgrading the Wordpress software didn’t change a thing, and my hosting company was quite unhelpful, as was Wordpress support. I kept hearing the same crap I’ve heard so many times in life, implicitly if not explicitly: “it’s you, Doug.”

OK, cool, I can deal with that. Hey, I’ve been me for a long time, and I know how to roll with the punches that come with that role.

So for the last few months, I’ve been manually clearing out the moderation queue from time to time, and simply deleting everything that’s there. I’ve typed DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved=’0′ so many times I can do it in my sleep, but unfortunately this solution deletes “real” comments as well as spam. Another great way to reduce traffic.

(Why don’t I manually review everything in the moderation queue? Because it quickly fills up with thousands of comments if I miss a few days — Wordpress’s spam filtering is another thing that hasn’t been working very well. And then Wordpress just crashes, if there are too many comments in the queue. Sorry.)

As a result of all this nonsense, I’ve lost interest in this blog, and have moved on to other places. I post pictures to my Flickr stream often, and I post on my Twitter feed every day (both of which you can find on the Mahugh.com home page). But the sheer tedium of dealing with all of the technical problems on this blog gives me incentive to stay away for weeks on end, and I do.

Going forward, I’m planning to migrate all of the content from here to a new blog over on Mahugh.com, but I have to do a few things first to get ready for that, and it will take a few hours to handle all the details after I’m ready. So that will be done this summer some time, if I had to guess. And the new blog will be a Doug & Megan blog.

After that’s done, I’ll be shutting down this blog (and saving $19.95 a month, whee!), and Megan will be shutting down hers, too (more savings!). Then we’ll both post to the new blog, which will be on our own site so we’ll have more control over the techie details.

I’m also planning to shut down my Facebook page, because Facebook has become a place where people go to kill time, and that’s not a mode I’ve been in much lately. And it’s totally redundant: like LinkedIn, but with SuperPoking and such.

Flickr for photos, Twitter for snippets of nonsense, LinkedIn for business contacts, a blog where the wife and I can share deep thoughts … what more does a guy need?

Prague and Budapest

March 29th, 2009 6:21 am 5 comments

We were in Prague all last week, and now we’ve arrived in Budapest. I’ve been busy swapping pictures and comments on Twitter and Flickr with various people (including many of the people whom I was working with in Prague), but I thought I’d stick a few thumbnails here in case anyone is interested and hasn’t been following all of that. Our mothers, for example, have been oddly silent — if they’ve seen any of the Prague photos, they’re apparently in stunned silence.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from Prague:

Here’s a link to all of the photos I posted from Prague.

It’s raining today in Budapest, but the weather forecast shows sunny skies later this week, so expect many more photos from here. This search will get you to whatever I post from Budapest this week. (It just has one photo at the moment, but if you click that link later in the week you’ll see whatever I’ve added.)

Mom's latest adventure

March 13th, 2009 5:38 pm Comments Off

Just received an email from my peripatetic mother:

Hi,

We are in Guatamala City and just found out our flight to Flores hasbeen delayedseveral hours. So instead of going shopping, I decided totry and send an email. This morning was the optional trip to hike up above the canopy oftrees and zip line down. The hike up was rough, but one of the guidescut a couple walking sticks for me…so I made it. And I passed thetrial test and was allowed to go by myself *my room mate failed thatand had to have a guide go on the line with her…On the fourth line Idid something wrong and lost the glove from my braking hand so Icrashed into the helper and knocked him over and skinned myself up.So the last four zips I went with a guide too. Our guide said ineight years of doing this I am his first casualty…not what you wantto be known for.Yesterday we were on a boat ride on Lake Atitlan..at 900 feet..thedeepest lakein Central America. We stopped at three differentindigenous Mayan villages and hardly saw any tourists exceptourselves. In one village our guide divided usintogroups and gave useach a shoppinglist of four items and sent us to the local markettoget them. That was really fun. Then the items we purchased weretaken to an indigenous family who let us see their home. The house isactually four different buildings…all made of mud and sticks withdirt floors.

Love,Mom/LaVonne

Go Mom go. See you next week.

The first words of “The Last Word”

February 25th, 2009 10:14 pm 8 comments

There are a few readers of this blog who knew me way back when. That is, way back when I quit a good job at Boeing to work on a project so urgent and timely that it just couldn’t wait. In January of 1982, the world needed the ultimate guide to playing Defender, and I was just the guy to write it. (Note to current employer: don’t worry, I learned my lesson. And I didn’t have a mortgage way back when.)

So I spent a few months writing a book about playing Defender. It was around 50,000 words when I was done, and I had the best video-game player I knew read it and critique it. (Hi Tad.) Then the March 1982 issue of Playboy came out, and I bought a copy so that I could read the interview in it with Eugene Jarvis, lead designer/developer of Defender. I learned he lived in Chicago, and I called information (think “Google for landlines,” boys and girls) and found there was only one Eugene Jarvis in the 312 area code. Soon I had talked to him, secured his mailing address, and I sent him and his partner Larry Demar a copy of my manuscript (printed on a borrowed Epson MX-80, written on a Heath H-89 in WordStar, CP/M version). Larry read every word, and wrote copious notes in the margins. They thought I was a freak.

And I guess I was. I was nearly out of money by then, so I had moved back into my parents’ basement and was living cheap, writing and editing all day and playing Defender until the wee hours most nights. I spent my last $400 on a trip to Chicago, having never been there, and after one memorable night at the Hotel Lincoln (where the couple in the next room kept me up half the night), I slept on Eugene’s couch for a couple of nights and hung out with Larry and Eugene during the day, discussing the details of my manuscript and polishing it up. They were amazed at how much I knew about the game, but slightly skeptical of my claims about my scoring, so they had the best Defender player they had ever seen, a 15 year-old kid from Mount Prospect, come to their office on Halsted in Boystown to play a match with me. I beat him mercilessly. Hey, I was 24 years old and desperately broke, and he was just in the way.

A couple months later, a publisher in Skokie named Lou Weber decided to start a video game magazine called Joystik. They interviewed Eugene Jarvis for the first issue, and he suggested they should check out the Defender freak from Seattle. Soon I was on a plane to Chicago again, copy of my manuscript in hand, to be photographed (hi George) “keeping the mutants at bay” (Hi Scott). Later that day, I met with Mr. Weber. He opened my manuscript to a random page (page 12, as it turned out), and read aloud this paragraph:

The smart bomb cannot be used indiscriminately. You can only use smart bombs when you have one or more bombs accumulated in the bomb display register, located to the right of your score at the top of the screen. If there are no bombs displayed there, the smart bomb button has no effect. You’re given three bombs at the start of the game, and an additional bomb is awarded for each 10,000 points scored. Smart bombs don’t harm the men on the planet’s surface. In fact, that’s how smart bombs got their name – they’re smart enough to distinguish friends from foes. In many games of Defender this makes smart bombs the most intelligent participant.

“Are those your words?” he asked, with what I heard as an accusatory tone. “Did you write that?” Although it wasn’t a paragraph that I was especially proud of, I answered “yes.” An hour later, I had accepted a $17,000 per year job offer. A week later, I had moved to Chicago, where I lived for many years.

And the manuscript was never published. We published a couple of excerpts in articles in JoyStik, and that was it. So the manuscript, in hard copy and hard copy only, has been following me around for 27 years, hanging out on dusty shelves, hiding in packed boxes, pages turning off-white over time, ink fading slowly.

Until a couple years ago, when my lovely wife (hi Megan) decided to manually type it all back into a file for me. Her labor of love is nearly done, and I can’t wait to finally publish my Defender manuscript. I’m proud of the extremely detailed and accurate information about the details of Defender playing, although the more zealous passages make me cringe a bit now:

… video game players, bored with repetitive pattern games, have found in Defender a truly honest game, where the final score is always a reflection of the player’s skill, knowledge, and practice.

I’ve lost all interest in making any money off it (and coincidentally, all such opportunities, if any ever existed, are long ago dead), which gives me complete creative freedom. I’m going to put it on Mahugh.com, exactly as it was way back when, with the only change being that I might have Tad over to re-create a bunch of situations and take photos to replace the crude dot-matrix graphics I had in the original manuscript.

I’m not ready to roll the whole thing out yet, but for those who might be amused by it, which is roughly everyone who’s still reading at this point (hi Mom), here’s the introduction to “Defender: The Last Word” …

My first impression of the game of Defender was probably typical. I had stopped at Arnold’s, an arcade in Seattle’s University District, to play a few games of Radarscope and Berzerk, the only video games I could stand (or understand) at the time. While my friend and I played Radarscope, I noticed several University of Washington techno-twits crowded around a new game that one of them was playing. After finishing our game (it was a good game for me and lasted perhaps two minutes), we walked over to see what they were so excited about. After watching for several minutes, I still didn’t know.

The machine itself looked like many other video games I had seen. It had a colorful TV screen at about a twelve year old’s eye level, and a small ledge below the screen supporting a lever and a few buttons. The player was frantically pushing and slapping at those buttons, breathing hard the whole time and occasionally darting a free hand up to brush his sweaty hair out of his eyes. I decided, from the player’s wide eyes and look of intense, almost painful, concentration, as well as the steady stream of advice from his friends (”swarmers behind you”, “kill the mutant”, baiter coming”, “nuke the pods”) that this game wasn’t for me – I liked to think that I played video games to relax and have fun.

The TV screen that showed what was happening in the game only added to its hectic impression. There were dozens of brightly colored and strangely shaped objects flying around the screen, including a small white spaceship. From my experience with other video games, I assumed that the player was trying to control that spaceship. When the ship collided with another object on the screen, there would be a loud explosion, with the ship bursting into a hundred pieces. Just when I thought I had figured out the object of the game – to avoid all of the objects on the screen – the ship ran into a small white rectangle, and instead of an explosion, a little number flashed on the screen near the ship. As the ship flew away from this encounter, the white rectangle hung from its belly. As if that wasn’t confusing enough, occasionally the ship would fly right through what appeared to be the mountains. To top it all off, there was a constant barrage of squealing, buzzing, whistling sounds coming from a small speaker above the playing screen. Just above that speaker was a bright red and yellow sign proudly proclaiming that game’s name: Defender.

That was my first impression of the game of Defender, in March of 1981. And although it may have been a typical first impression, my involvement with the game since then has been anything but typical. Two months after deciding never to play the game, I was playing Defender up to ten hours a day. Two months later, my average game was over an hour in length and I was practicing for a regional Defender contest. Two months after that, I had won the contest’s $1000 first prize, and was able to play as long as I cared to on every quarter (24 hours on one occasion).

In those first six months, I spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours playing and studying the game of Defender, and I met other Defender players around the Seattle area who had also spent all of their free time and money on the game. Some of these players were very good, some were stuck in a rut, playing again and again every day without improving, but there was one thing that they all had in common: regardless of their degree of success in the game, they were obsessed with it. Defender, because of its complexity, can remain challenging and enjoyable to a player far longer than any other video game.

Many of the players I saw remained challenged by the game of Defender for a very negative reason: they were not getting any better. The problem seemed to be a lack of information; many Defender players assume that they already know everything about the game, and further progress is just a matter of practice. This is seldom true. There is so much to learn about the game of Defender that any single player can have gaping holes in his understanding that will go unfilled until he is exposed to the ideas of many other players.

This was never more obvious to me than one day when I saw two young men playing the Defender machine at a sandwich shop where I had stopped for lunch. One of them was showing the other how to play.

“Now, you just fly real low here and shoot these white things before they get you”, he explained. The “white things” he was shooting were the men that the Defender player is supposed to be defending; the loss of all ten of those men causes the game to go into free space, a much more difficult situation than regular play.

The player quickly shot down all of his own men, carefully dodging his real opponents. Just as he shot the last one, sending the game into free space and plunging his ship into a sea of deadly mutants (with a total score of 0 points), he clenched his teeth and began firing rapidly, muttering to his friend, “That first attack wave isn’t too bad, but after you finish it the game gets pretty fucking hard!”

The intent of this book is to make you a better Defender player. Whether you’re completely new to the game or you’ve been playing every day for a year, there’s plenty of information here to help you improve. These ideas, however, must be practiced many times before they will be reflected in your score. Good Defender playing is never the result of shortcuts, but that’s part of Defender’s appeal – video game players, bored with repetitive pattern games, have found in Defender a truly honest game, where the final score is always a reflection of the player’s skill, knowledge, and practice. (Well, the machine’s settings also affect your score, but we’ll look at that later.)

The best way to derive the full benefit of the ideas contained in this book is to practice them perfectly, over and over. Since perfect practice is, in the real world, an unattainable goal, most of your practice while learning these ideas should be mental, away from the game. Once you can mentally recall all of the details of a particular move quickly and flawlessly, the step to real-life performance (if such a phrase may be used in reference to video games) is a small one.

Chapter 1 is a short and simple beginners’ course in playing Defender, and Chapter 2 is a discussion of the controls used.

Every game of Defender presents new and unique challenges, but there are certain situations that come up very often. These situations are the subject of Chapters 3 through 7, which explain the behavior of the game’s opponents: landers, mutants, swarmers, bombers, and baiters. Each chapter describes the behavior of a particular opponent and then gives specific advice about how to take advantage of that behavior. The solutions given are not the only ones that work, but they are the techniques used by most successful Defender players.

Chapter 8 describes when and how to catch falling men and set them down. Catching falling men is difficult for beginning players, and even an experienced player can have trouble trying to catch a falling man when many opponents are on the screen. Chapter 8 has an added section on catching men when there are swarmers on the screen, a particularly dangerous maneuver for all players.

Chapters 9 and 10 both assume that you have mastered all of the maneuvers described in earlier chapters. Chapter 9 explains how to deal effectively with free space, the biggest challenge in the game of Defender. Chapter 10 covers strategies for getting through the higher attack waves. Both of these chapters give you several different approaches to choose from; individual limits and abilities will determine which one should be used.

Chapter 11 is a collection of tips and observations that are not easily classified. Some of the tricks in Chapter 11 might not help you get a higher score, but they’re so much fun that I included them anyway. There is also a section on very long games (over 1,000,000 points) that will be useful when you decide to set the world record, as all Defender players eventually do.

Like The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, Defender has spawned a sequel. Stargate has roughly the same concept and controls as Defender, with a handful of new opponents and special features thrown in. It appeals mostly to experienced Defender players, although Stargate is actually a little easier than Defender for beginners. Chapter 12 covers the differences between Stargate and Defender.

The next and last chapter is not specifically about playing Defender, but the ideas covered in it are important to anyone who wants to play to the best of his individual abilities. Chapter 13 is a discussion of the psychology of consistent and successful video game playing. Many players are capable of much better playing than they realize, and it is my hope that Chapter 13 will help these players to achieve their full potential.

Before you plunge headlong into the world of playing Defender, I should warn you that good Defender playing is intense. Not only is the game itself intense, with its fast and overwhelming action, but the lifestyle of a hard-core Defender player is often equally intense – if you have a rampant imagination, you’ll catch yourself living the game as well as playing it.

When I first learned the swarmer follow move (described in Chapter 5), I used to practice it while riding my motorcycle. I would follow the white bumps between lanes of the road, mowing them down by fluttering my right hand against the handlebar. One night, while leading my brother in the car behind me to the Spot Tavern in South Seattle to practice Defender, I was so busy shooting swarmers on the road that I missed the break in the curb while turning into the parking lot, and bounced over the sidewalk at 25 mph.

The motorcycle skidded to a stop at the front door, with me miraculously still on top. My shins and hands were bleeding where they had dragged across the footpegs and mirrors, but I just walked inside to the Defender machine and put down a quarter. When it came my turn to play, the blood on my hands had dried enough that I could get a firm grip on the controls, so I pushed the start button and roared into the world of Defender. By wave 2, when I shot the first swarmers of the game, I had completely forgotten my injuries.

That time of year again

February 22nd, 2009 6:35 pm Comments Off

I noticed something funny this afternoon in my Flickr stats. A few photos from three years ago, which I uploaded to Flickr last summer, are suddenly getting lots of hits. This one here, for example, had 200 viewers today, over 80% of them coming from search engines.

Oh yeah. It’s Carnival again!

Apparently I'm SpeedDating. Who knew?

February 4th, 2009 1:34 pm Comments Off

Good grief. The tortured amateurishness of Facebook’s UI, and resulting confusion and chaos, is legendary. Nonetheless, like millions of other people who have a clear business case for High School 2.0, I stumble through it and try to do the needfull whenever I can. But now it seems that even the Facebook remoras (those little software developers scurrying around the jowls of the Face, scarfing up wayward minutes and the occasional leftover dollar) are getting in on the “confuse the users” game. And doing it with great humor.

To wit: I signed up for a Facebook app called BigPhoto back in 2007, to display a rotating assortment of photos on my Facebook page. Pictures of me presenting at conferences, pictures of well-known geeks I’m pretending to be on a first-name basis with, that sort of stuff. It worked fine for a while, and then after the much-hated UI “upgrade” of last year, I completely forgot about BigPhoto, because it no longer appeared on the home page and I didn’t know how to get to it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Well, apparently BigPhoto has been renamed SpeedDate. And judging from the name change, they’ve become, ah, a little more specialized, at the very least. And then today, I received this email in my in-box at work:

Sorry coconate1, but I’m happily married, to a woman who shares my contempt for the new Facebook UI, among many things. My apologies for your heartbreak upon hearing the news … please take it up with “BigPhoto.”

Doug’s World

Twitter Followers

Ike

Elton

Where's Doug?

Prague and Budapest

Mom's latest adventure

The first words of “The Last Word”

That time of year again

Apparently I'm SpeedDating. Who knew?

25 Things

Blogroll

Doug's work blog

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