Once again, I am stuck in Department of Motor Vehicles hell

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I often tell folks I’m cursed when it comes to dealing with the DMV, and most often they shrug, as if to say – we’re all cursed, it’s banal. To which I assert that you’ve seen nothing till you’ve seen the trouble I’ve been through. My latest story:

I moved to MA. I go get insurance, they charge me an extra $80 a year for driving without insurance in ’92, which I did not do, it’s a paperwork error from NY that I discovered when I moved to NY 2 years ago.

Anyway, next I go in to MA DMV, take a ticket, wait 45 minutes, and get my turn at the window. Some minutes later, I am informed that my right to drive in MA is suspended, and has been since 1992. Why, I ask. Turns out I had a ticket which I paid, but which they claim I paid late. Suddenly I remember what happened 14 years ago – I got a ticket returning to Maine from NY after Thanksgiving. I paid the ticket. A year later I get a letter informing me I did not pay, and that my right to drive is suspended. I dig up the canceled check and send it via registered mail to MA, saying ‘I did pay, here’s a copy of my check you cashed.’ They respond – ‘ok, but you paid late,’ because they calculate the payment not by when the check was cashed, but by when I responded via registered mail (!!!). I write them back a registered snarky mail which amounts to, fuck you, your system is mistaken, look at the date again, you cashed my check before the due date of the ticket.’ They respond ‘no. Pay up.’ I start ignoring them, and 14 years pass. We forget about each other.

Until this past Friday. It costs me 4.5 hours and several hundred dollars to resolve this, get my new license and registration, and escape DMV. I go home. As I am putting the registration into its pouch, what do I notice? They’ve issued me a license with my Dad’s name (David C. Hamilton instead of the correct David L. Hamilton). This despite me having provided multiple forms of ID with the correct identity on it (NY License, Passport, Birth Certificate, Social Security Card).

So, back to DMV for me today. What do you want to bet this costs me hundreds to resolve? And trust me, you don’t want my Dad’s identity, he has creditors looking for him, they sometimes end up calling me. Now that my license says me is him, I almost guarantee they come looking for me.

I’m cursed when it comes to the DMV, I tell you. Cursed!

(I never wrote about my last run in with them, when I moved to NY, but it was similar. Failed to turn in license plates when I moved to maine in ’92, so NY recorded me as driving without insurance, which I had not done (I had simply failed to turn in my plates), so NY recorded me as driving unregistered and uninsured. For 13 years. I say fine, how much will it cost to fix this, they say ‘$25’ I ask to pay, and they say ‘you can’t do that here, this is a regional office, go pay at the central office.’)

!!!

Fucking DMV.

My prediction for E3

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So this week is the biggest gaming convention of the year. This year I’m going to offer up a dark horse prediction which I have not seen anyone else mention – Sony and Blizzard will announce that Diablo III is a Playstation 3 exclusive. There are a few things which suggest this to me –

  • Blizzard is hiring console networking programmers
  • Blizzard is known to be working on Diablo III
  • Rumors and other hints (tradeshow promotional materials and the like) that Diablo III would be featured at the show appeared then were quickly quashed
  • It makes more sense that it would be Diablo III that is announced, than Worlds of Warcraft, since WoW is not well suited to console play and since it’s a pre-existing title that doesn’t show a lot of promise for selling PS3 consoles (ie, folks are not going to buy a ps3 to play it – with 5 million customers, they’re already playing, and may even be bored of it by the time the PS3 ships) and
  • Sony needs something huge at E3 to make a splash with. Few things would make bigger splashes.

We’ll see if I’m good at reading the tea leaves in a couple days. I’ll post afterwords about it.

A shrine to Robotron

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If you grew up during the 80’s and played arcade games during that time, chances are very good that you have an appreciation for the games that came out of Williams during that era – they produced a string of great games that came to define the twitch arcade game, and their penultimate game, Robotron 2084, was the best of the lot. For today’s friday Fun link I’m linking over to this Robotron 2084 fanpage, with tons of info about the game. I still play Robotron regularly using M.A.M.E. and recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of twitch arcade games.

Next big step in the evolution of gaming hardware?

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Is it physics processing? Before you scoff, try and remember back when the first 3dfx 3d graphics acceleration cards were shipping. They cost $100’s of dollars, few games supported them, and very few people believed they were worth the expense.

Until they actually saw one in action.

If you’ve played Halflife 2, you’ve seen somewhat effective physics modeling and the effect it can have on gameplay. Imagine then that you could accelerate and accentuate that to the nth degree – if you could, you’d have something like the Ageia PhysX PPU (warning – dumb flash-intensive site…and yeah…stupid name, but anyway), a ~$300 product designed to offer physics acceleration to gaming engines in the same way 3d cards offered graphics acceleration.

It’s very early days on this stuff – the cards are just showing up at retail this weekend the only game you can buy that supports them is the just-released Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, a well reviewed game, no doubt, but not something that’s going to convince many folks to rush out and buy a $300 piece of hardware to enhance it. There’s more to come, though, including the next Rise of Nations game (shipping in a week or so) and more importantly the entire Unreal 3.0 engine. That last is the real deal, the system that can potentially make the physics PPU a worthy addition to your gaming rig. Unreal Engine 2.0 is the most licensed 3d engine of the current generation, showing up in dozens of games each year for the last couple of years, and there’s a great likelihood the same will be true of version 3.0.

I won’t be rushing out to buy one of these cards, but I do have high hopes for this. I also hope the price drops, just as they have for 3d accelerators, and that more developers latch onto them.

There’s a pretty good review of the now-shipping cards over on hexus.net – for those who can’t be bothered to read it, their conclusion is similar to mine – shows promise but it’s early days.

Oh, and there are movies from a variety of games (including GRAW) demonstrating what physics processors can add to games at the Aegia site I linked to above. Unfortunately they focus on eye candy when I really think it’s in gameplay mechanics where these devices could prove the most interesting. Generally eye candy is what the masses go for though so I can’t fault them for focusing on it. Definitely check them out – whether it is this product or one from some other vendor, I think the concept is here and will begin to emerge as a selling point in gaming over the next couple of years.

Reality intrudes on my virtuality

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So I’m sitting at work, writing up notes for a meeting tomorrow. My office is dark – I much prefer indirect lighting to overhead lighting so I never have it on. I have a dual monitor setup and on the second monitor, I notice what appears to be a bug crawling across my web browser’s screen. I think to myself ‘evil javascript!’ figuring it is some dhtml/javascript deal, and slide the mouse over to the other screen to investigate, trying to click on it, and when that doesn’t work, loading the source code up in another tab to see what’s what. Finding nothing, I launch spybot seek and destroy, worrying that I’ve got something worse going on. As I do this, I observe the bug crawl outside the browser window and suddenly it dawns on me – it’s a real bug! A vile tick, to make matters worse, which I quickly snatch up with a post-it, then seal it to it with some tape.

It turns out that in a dark room a bug crawling on my screen is silhouetted by the back lighting, making for a perfect little optical illusion. I had a good laugh over it, though it still freaks me out that a tick randomly showed up in my office. Soolin hasn’t been with me at the office for several days because of the weather so it seems likely it came from somewhere else.

A sad, sad photo

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I don’t normally post to stuff like this, but this caught my eye on a website whose ad banner wasn’t being blocked by adblock + (yes I know, time to update my filters). Anyway, shed a tear for the poor, poor bottles of Grolsch:

mediaHUMP.com Media

Panorama of the land behind my house

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I posted a panorama of the land behind my house in my image gallery. It’s a Quicktime VR, meaning you need Quicktime to check it out, and meaning that you can click and drag within the image to look around. It’s in the ‘Misc photos II’ gallery, or you can go directly to it.

My house is behind the red barn. You can spot the ghost of Soolin if you pan around in the shot, and if you look at the treeline when you pan around you can see the mountain range that is a couple of miles south.