Director  

The Surge: It's been a very quiet month here at darrelplant.com. I know. I haven't really had a lot to say on politics except in reaction to things, and I usually leave those in comments at other sites and blogs. I fire up Twitter only every couple of days, mostly just to see what other people are up to, although I did have a brief exchange with iPhone author @jeff_lamarche the other day about 1970s editions of Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets. And I've been checking in on Facebook to keep in touch with Director-Xtra-developer-turned-poker-pro Tomer Berda as he's been playing in the European Poker Tour events in Estonia and Portugal this month.

But the main reason the blog's been so quiet is that all of a sudden I have a handful of projects. Not just any projects but Director projects. And just to crank the bizarre to 11, they're Director 8.5 projects. Technically, I guess that would be cranking the bizarre back from 11 (or 11.5). I've even had to buy a couple of Xtras (from Tomer, natch) for the first time in seven years.

I'm not chalking this up to some resurgence in Director, but the work is certainly welcome after several years of drought.

Books  

The Internet Did It: The Huffington Post featured a piece yesterday consisting of short essays on the future of literary reviews in the world of the internet by the editors of journals ranging from Agni to The Yale Review. I guess that's an important topic now that the web's been around for more than fifteen years. Always good to mull these things over.

For my own part, of course, I'm proud to say that the internet had nothing to do with the demise of my own review. Plant's Review of Books was able to collapse entirely without me saying "The computers did it!" or "Nobody reads any more!" 100% human failure. I take the rap.

What the...?  

Bimbo Eruption:

Food 4 Less still has the durian fruit in their produce section. While Barbara and I were shopping there today I noticed another less exotic though still amusing import.

When we were in Mexico a couple of years back, I saw the Bimbo bakeries logo everywhere on signs, trucks, and shops. We got a bit of a chuckle remembering Barbara's research a couple decades back to demolish an opposing attorney's argument claiming that "bimbo" wasn't really a derogatory term. I guess it's a good thing he hadn't spent much time in Spain or Mexico or he'd have claimed it just meant "bread".

We wondered at the time how the brand would fare in the US, little knowing that Bimbo was already the corporate owner of well-known US brands like Orowheat, Entenmann's, and Boboli. And now you can get your Bimbo bread here in Portland.

What the...?  

Behold the Catsino:

Last week was the first time I'd ever hosted the bi-weekly poker game that I've been playing in for a couple of years, so I had to set everything up to make sure that at least one table could be shoehorned into the space I was planning to use. As you can see, our living room doesn't have the typical poker mancave ambience of someone's basement/garage/unused bedroom.

The "Catsino" is not only bright and airy, but it's got a couch, a loveseat, and a cushy chair like "The Grand" room at the Golden Nugget Casino where Poker After Dark is filmed (although there's a bit less clearance between the back of the player's chairs and the cushions). The stuff on top of the TV includes the Ganesh statue I bought for our nineteenth anniversary.

You can probably guess from the fact that I took a picture I was pretty pleased with the setup. I arranged 20 buy-ins and add-ons worth of chips and a bunch of extras on the table, put an ace of diamonds and four of clubs on the table to honor Tomer Berda's World Series of Poker bracelet win (using one of the "official" WSOP decks I bought in Vegas when I flew down to have lunch with him, and which are not standard-size poker cards), and fortuitously found a clip from Poker After Dark to put on the TV showing Phil Ivey about to lose a bunch of money with a set of fours to David "Viffer" Peat who's drawn a flush with my favorite hand: a suited ace and jack.

Politics  

Eleventy-Dimensional Chess: This has ben percolating in my brain for a long time now, but it finally boiled over last night as a comment at First Draft:

The whole chess thing has to go away. Whoever thought it was a good idea to start using chess as an analogue for how "smart" politicians operate knows absolutely nothing about game theory, and the mindless repetition of the trope, if anything, just hammers the point in about how little the general public and commentators understand it.

Chess is a game of absolute knowledge. Nothing is hidden in a game of chess. There's no chance, there's no accident, there's nothing that can't potentially be foreseen and predicted. The only thing that can go wrong in chess is that someone makes a mistake. All the pieces are on the board. Their starting positions are set. The pieces can only move in specific ways. The only variance is whether you move first or not. Eleventy-dimensional chess is just twenty-dimensional tic-tac-toe.

But life and politics aren't like that. An unexpected event (aka "shit") happens. People lie about what they're going to do. Or they lie about the facts to the public and dare you to call them on it. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in chess or checkers or tic-tac-toe. There are a lot of games it does happen in, but success in those games requires a healthy dose of skepticism and a willingness to take chances which have been woefully absent in this administration.

Politics  

Macho Man: By the time you read this, George Stanley McGovern, former Senator of South Dakota and 1972 Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States will be on the ground one way or another, after skydiving on the morning of his 88th birthday today.

Just a little grist to add to the mill for my theory that George McGovern doesn't scare easily, as I mentioned on Daily Kos the other day.

Director  

Tomer Berda Interviewed by ESPN.com:

Politics  

Yes, English: Today it was in front of Target but I'd seen the bumper sticker before:

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, thank a soldier!

What we see is the evolution (presuming the person sporting this version believes in evolution) of the bumper sticker phrase "If you can read this, you're too close!" through the "thoughtful" phase which featured just the first line above to a jingoistic, anti-intellectual response that, like most blind expressions of nationalism doesn't really make any sense. Except for the brain fevers of the Reagan years when the Soviets were going to drive their tanks up from Nicaragua* or the more recent Reconquista fears of Lou Dobbs (or Phillip K. Dick's novel Man in the High Castle), when has the US been in danger of being subjugated by non-English speakers? The only serious invasions of US territory were two centuries ago, and the people who did the invading spoke English perfectly well because they were the English. You might as well have a bumper sticker that says:

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can read it in English, thank your
pre-Revolutionary colonial masters!

* You have to wonder why the hell would anyone want to invade Brownsville, Texas or Red Dawn-era Colorado, anyway. Wouldn't the Soviets have been smarter to just hop across to Sarah's house and take over the Alaskan oil fields?

Politics  

Our Economic Future:

In the land of Atlantis where the sun don't shine
It gets darker down there every day
That's when two explorers fell into a mine
And that's the price they have to pay

They carry their clubs upon their back
Mole men, mole men
They climb above ground and then attack
Mole men, mole men
Beware of the head mole man, Jack
Mole men, mole men

They're the slavery labor of the underground
Their masters make them suffer and work
If you listen you're sure to hear the terrible sound
Of mole men crawling out of the dirt

The Dickies, "Attack of the Mole Men", Dawn of the Dickies

Director  

Bracelet Winner: Just over a month ago I posted an item about Tomer Berda, the DirectXtras developer who's turned poker pro and who took fifth place (and $117K) in one of the early tournaments of the 2010 World Series of Poker, which has been running since Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas.

After emailing congratulations to him, Tomer was gracious enough to offer me some time to talk over poker, so I flew down to have lunch with him a week or so after his win. We sat for four hours in his favorite Thai restaurant a mile from the din of the Rio, I watched him eat a couple of lunches, he gave me more tips about playing poker than I can remember, and he told me about his life as a professional poker player and expressed his hope that he could win a bracelet at this year's WSOP (the bracelet being the award given to first-place finishers in addition to a hefty sum of money).

After his early win, it wqas a frustrating series for Tomer. There are about twenty general No Limit Hold'em tournaments during the series, and Tomer entered most of them, not making it past the first day of competition after his showing in Event 5 (the events tend to run three to five days depending on the number of entrants, which varies with the buy-ins of $1,000 to $5,000). The last tournament before the Main Event had a $2,500 buy-in, and 1,941 entrants. Big-name players like Daniel Negranu, Chris Moneymaker, and Phil Ivey fell by the wayside in the first day; an extra day had to be added to the schedule because of a late start, computer glitches, and a larger-than-expected field.

This event went better for Tomer, though, and just about midnight, after three hours of wild back-and-forth with Vladimir Kochelaevskiy over the chip lead, Tomer finally shut him down, winning his first WSOP bracelet and nearly $826,000. I would have loved to have seen it in person myself, but Tomer had some family there rooting for him, including his father (in the picture with Tomer).

Books  

Diconix: It's summer again (at least that's what they tell us here in Portland despite the record rain in June and a totally blown Independence Day forecast which has ended up with cloud cover and no sight of the sun today) and time for cleaning out the boxes and corners of the house and garage.

Twenty years ago this summer I was in New York City for the first time. I'd just graduated from Reed (eleven years after getting out of high school, after attending three other institutions of higher education, and having spent five years out of school, a good portion of that unemployed). Barbara and I had just bought a house but we hadn't been able to move in before I left for NYC, because the closing check hadn't been paid to the previous owner yet, and she needed the money for deposits on the apartment she was moving to (the rental house we moved out of on my graduation day just sold for $228,736).

Back then I was working for Powell's Books, as was Barbara (after leaving her legal practice) and her sister Lori (who lived with us). I was fairly proud of my position within the company. I'd started off working in company-wide returns and stocking the downtown store's pop fiction section (everything from Tom Clancy to Barbara Cartland), then standardized the shipping for downtown (which had been more or less a free-for-all) and basically became the shipping department. All the while I was going to school at Reed I was working full-time at the store. I proposed a desktop publishing department to management around 1988 or 1989 and they spent $10K to buy a Mac II, a LaserWriter, and software with which I did signage, advertising, and an employee newsletter. I had big plans for the company, including a magazine that reviewed new and old books, in keeping with the Powell's philosophy.

So during my last year at Reed I started looking for how to burnish my publishing credentials and I found the New York University Summer Institute in Book & Magazine Publishing. I applied and was accepted and then the whole thing with the house happened and I had to head out, leaving barbara in the lurch to complete the move (most of our stuff was in the new house's garage, Barbara and Lori were staying with out friend Paula).

I carried my Mac Plus to New York, and I ordered this neat little printer from Kodak. The Diconix M150 is probably the smallest printer I will ever own. It weighs less than three pounds, it's smaller than a thick book of history. And it's twenty years old.

It's probably a bit difficult for some folks to remember the tech environment of two decades ago. It's even hard for me to come to grips with it sometimes and I was there. Lots of people are used to working on laptops that weigh next to nothing these days (not to mention iPads or smartphones) but the physical act of printing still requires non-virtual elements: some sort of mechanism that moves a printhead across a piece of paper and a type of ink or toner at the minimum. The Diconix was slow and its output was far from ideal, but for me, in an NYU dorm on Third Avenue printing out comps of cover graphics or proposals for books, it was like having some piece of spy paraphernalia.

After NYU I proofed a couple of books for Random House, but even though I had the key to his office, Michael Powell wasn't down with the idea of a book review magazine. At least not with me at the helm. After I left the company and started up Plant's Review of Books a couple of years later, Powell's came out with their own literary magazine, and of course now their critically-acclaimed web site is full of exactly the type of thing that I was trying to get off the ground twenty years ago, but them's the breaks.

Director  

Bedeviled: The Most Diabolical iPhone Game Sales Figures Ever!:

Today is the first anniversary of the release of my only items in the iPhone App Store: versions 0 and 1 (aka the free version and the paid version) of Bedeviled: The Most Diabolical Sliding Puzzle Game Ever!

I hadn't expected to get rich on Bedeviled. For one thing, after fifteen years in the freelance programming business, I have no illusions of getting rich off of anything I'm likely to do. After having to get a new laptop (my circa-2003 "Windtunnel" G4 desktop doesn't have one of them newfangled Intel chips) and an iPod touch just to develop for the iPhone OS, I was hoping to maybe break even. After deciding to invest in Unity for the development of Bedeviled (back when you had to pay for the base product and the iPhone addon), I wasn't expecting to do even that.

Being one of those people who likes to share information, though, I was anticipating sharing my sales figures with other developers, especially my colleagues in the Director community, particularly those who had made or were contemplating the iPhone market. I was especially impressed by the openness of other iPhone game developers, like Australia's Firemint, who put together a 16-page PDF report of sales figures covering the period from just before their Flight Control game took off to become one of the biggest hits of 2009. I thought it would be rather amusing to put together a similarly-formatted report for Bedeviled, just because the contrast was going to be huge. But I do love statistics.

I regret to inform everyone that I have failed to do so. Bedeviled came out on the Friday before July 4 weekend last year, amid a flurry of iOS 3 applications that were launched following the update's mid-June release date. For that and whatever other reasons (poor marketing?), not only did Bedeviled fail to sell but people didn't even download the free version in any significant numbers. And by significant, I mean that in the first month about 250 people had downloaded the free version and 20 (most of whom I knew) had spent 99¢ to buy a copy. Needless to say, the numbers didn't pick up after the first month. After a certain point, I stopped bothering to download the reports from iTunes Connect; it was quite apparent that without some infusion of advertising (and that's no guarantee) I wasn't going to see a penny from that particular project. Currently, Apple only sends you a check if the amount you've earned in a particular territory (US, Canada, Europe, Japan, etc.) is greater than an equivalent to $150, and since you only get 70¢ of each $1 in sales, you need to sell about $215 worth of product in a territory to get paid. 20 copies in the first month wasn't going to do it.

So here's the rundown: 1 sale in Europe (thank you Czech Republic!) in July 2009. 2 copies in Canada, one last July, one in January. 39 copies in the US, with most of them in the first month and no sales since April. That's what I have to share. It's kind of bleak but make of it what you will.

I've got plans for Bedeviled 2.

Director  

Cross Your Fingers: All you Director poker aficionados out there send a little luck off in the direction of Las Vegas. Tomer Berda, the brains behind DirectXtras has been out there since Memorial Day when he came in fifth in one of the early events at the World Series of Poker, and he's got another shot at moving into the money (and a winner's bracelet he'd really like to take down) in the next-to-last tournament of the series. He's currently 47th in a second day field of 585, but that can be pretty much meaningless in a poker tournament. Only 198 people will get any money at all (smallest prizes are a little over twice the $2,500 buy-in) but top prize is $825,000. And the bracelet.

What the...?  

I Have Been to the Mountaintop:

I have to say, I was quite pleased with how this shot came about, as well as how it looks. I was flying south out of Portland on Friday morning and about twenty minutes into the flight I had a great view of a snow-capped mountain outside my window. Like the TSA-obedient traveler that I am, however, I had "turned off, not just placed in airplane mode" all of my electronic devices, and that view was rapidly sliding away as I waited for my iPhone to start up. I got off a couple of quick shots of the mountain almost broadside, then sort of leaned forward to shoot back and get one last shot as we passed. I managed to get South Sister (in the foreground), with the peaks of the shorter Middle and North Sisters just poking through the clouds breaking over the Cascades, Mt. Jefferson in mid-range, and Mt. Hood just visible on the horizon.

What the...?  

June 11, 2001:

As always, a few words from my cousin Roxana about our grandmother, who was murdered nine years ago today:

I have spent many years in a volunteer capacity working against domestic violence, so I was shocked when my grandmother was shot and killed June 11 in the White Salmon area. My grandmother was bedridden, blind, and has suffered many strokes over the years. I did not expect her to die in this manner.

She died because her caregiver, Toni Stencil, was the target of an angry man.

There is not room to write all the details Toni has given me, and Toni has her own story to tell. I am not a legal expert, or an expert in domestic violence. I am simply a granddaughter asking questions and looking for answers on why my grandmother had to die so violently.

Through my questions, I have found out that the state of Washington has a Mandatory Arrest Law, as does Wisconsin, where I now live. This law does vary from state to state, and I'm not clear on the stipulations in your law. What I have been told by Toni is that she called 9-1-1 on the Thursday evening prior to the (Monday) shooting because this man had bound her and held her against her will for over three hours. She talked her way out of this dangerous situation and did call 9-1-1.

I wonder why he was not arrested on that evening. Certainly this will be determined, and police in White Salmon have declined to answer my questions concerning this issue at present.

Why should you care about this law? Remember that my grandmother was an innocent victim of a dispute between two people that she had absolutely nothing to do with. This was a dangerous man. Are the laws you have in place working for you? If not, why?

These are the questions running through my head that keep me up at night. There is another state law that interests me as well that I'm checking into concerning self-help information that is to be given to victims of domestic 9-1-1 calls. Three days passed between Toni's initial call for help and the shooting; she needed professional help. I have found out that you have the Programs For Peaceful Living. This program could have offered Toni some very needed support in a number of ways.

I pose these questions and tell this story because it is my way of helping and healing. On my own, I cannot look into your laws and check into the rapport between your police force and your programs in place to help people. You need to be concerned because you care about the health of your community. I believe domestic violence issues are so important, because the health of a whole community starts in the home.

Please support your local law enforcement and program such as Programs For Peaceful Living in working together against domestic violence.

What the...?  

That Special Glow:

I always thought that the words "licensed nuclear reactor operator" would be a neat addition to the baccalaureate in English Literature, but not surprisingly, the training program to operate the reactor at Reed College is no cakewalk. So I never even went into the reactor when I was a student, despite having taken an after-school class in third grade taught by a retired Civil Defense chief who taught us to use Geiger counters and calculate the biological effects of our long-term radiation exposure in a nuclear holocaust. But they were giving tours during last weekend's reunion activities and I got the shot of Cherenkov radiation above with my iPhone, standing practically over the reactor.

Director  

DirectPoker:

Tomer Berda at the WSOP, photo via wsop.com

Back in the day, one of the great sources for Director Xtras was DirectXtras, and the man behind it was Tomer Berda. Tomer had a suite of custom transition Xtras, a fast image manipulation Xtra, tools for FTP and email, communication Xtras that could talk to USB, serial, and parallel ports, even an SMS messaging Xtra. He was always a helpful voice on forums but I haven't had any correspondence with him for a number of years.

But I did a double-take when I was reading some of the news coming out of the World Series of Poker, which started last weekend. In the recap of one of the early events, a No-Limit Hold'em tournament with a $1,500 buy-in that drew more than 2,000 entrants, there was a list of big-name players who went out in places from 51st to 216th. But the name in fifth place, winning $117,416, was: Tomer Berda. According to PokerPages, the Tomer who won the WSOP event lives in Menlo Park, California, which is where DirectXtras is based. How many Tomer Berdas can there be in Menlo Park?

Either way, Tomer deserves praise for all he did with DirectXtras in the past. And the Tomer who did incredibly well at poker? He deserves praise even if he's not the same guy. But I'm going to believe he is, either way. [UPDATE] I emailed DirectXtras Tomer to conditionally congratulate him and he confirmed that he is, indeed, Poker Tomer.

What the...?  

If It Weren't For Bad Luck I'd Have No Luck At All...:

Hee Haw! It's official! I have the worst luck!

According to their analysis of 1,600+ Texas Hold-'Em hands I played in both tournament and ring games at Full Tilt Poker over a period of three months, Poker Luck Meter says that my luck was at "0% - The bottom 1% of worst possible luck." The kind of luck where, despite the fact that I got back-to-back four-of-a-kind hands the other night, I still lost the tournament. So I guess it's fortunate that I haven't had the kind of bankroll that might lead one to become a professional poker player — I'd only last about ten minutes, according to this.

I have not yet found a tool to analyze the rest of my life.

What the...?  

Check Your Package: From the Fujin yesterday:

A small lucky package is on its way to you soon.

Did you say a lucky package? These are always welcome.

What the...?  

Trivial Omen: Vijay Balse, the leader of the first of two games in the final round of Jeopardy!'s 2010 Tournament of Champions last night said in his mini-interview with Alex Trebeck last night that it took him six tryouts over a period of sixteen years to finally get picked to compete. So far I've only tried out four times including my first attempt about this time of the year in 1996 while I was in Los Angeles visiting my brother and proofing the first (and only) edition of my book on Shockwave, so perhaps there's still time.

Last week I got an email from Ken Jennings — the winningist person in Jeopardy! history — in response to something I'd sent him. That's gotta be a good omen, right? I mean, if you're inclined to believe in omens.