Yesterday, to celebrate the joint birthday of Severin and myself, we went to DisneyQuest with our wives, and also with Brian and Darren. (Apologies for the unwieldy sentence structure, but a comma-separated list could easily have been mistaken for an appositive.)

We arrived in time to be there when the doors opened, a disappointingly late 11:30. Immediately, we made a beeline for the Pirates of the Caribbean game, in which you stand upon a tiny re-creation of the fo'c's'le ringed with small cannon. One person stands at the ship's wheel (reversed, so that it steers like a car, and with a throttle to control the wind) and maneuvers the ship so that the gunners can yank on the pull-cords behind the cannon for all they're worth, and try to sink the ships for treasure. Karen, who gets motion sickness just watching a first-person shooter game, didn't feel even a little bit of nausea. Hooray!

Her luck didn't hold with Ride the Comix or Alien Encounter, unfortunately, but she did enjoy Cyberspace Mountain, in which you build your own rollercoaster, then step into a gimballed simulator which displays the coaster from the car's POV while pitching and rolling to match. (Copy from a poster outside: Cyberspace Mountain — Design it, then ride it in a real simulator! That's great, because I'd hate to waste my time in a fake simulator.)

There was much playing of nostalgic games (thanks to MAME, I didn't find the classic video games as appealing as many of the others did, but I enjoyed the air hockey greatly). After dinner, we were met by Carlos and Carolina, and among other things, managed to get all of us into the eight networked auto-racing machines at the same time. By the last lap, when I found myself in seventh place, I turned around and went backwards on the track. I deliberately ran into the first car I encountered, and (oddly enough) my place jumped up to sixth.

After staring at teenagers playing Dance Dance Revolution all day, we got in line for it. Cord and Brian went first, and managed to make it look completely unlike the country line-dancing that all the previous participants had made it resemble. I was next in line, but none of the others were brave enough to try it. So what the hell, I did it next to a kid probably less than half my age, who of course danced all over my grave. For some reason, I kept missing the little sensor squares, hitting the unyielding metal instead, and by the time we got to the third level, my brain was short-circuiting. Afterwards, though, I realized that there was absolutely no reason to scorn the school systems that were using Dance Dance Revolution in Phys Ed; that was one hell of a workout. No wonder all the kids who were good at it were skinny.

As the others went back to the classic arcade games, I designed and rode a roller coaster that contained nothing but moves that turned it upside down. Muah hah hah hah. Some more Pirates and Alien Encounter, and we finished off the night with a weird game called Panic Park, which has two "joysticks" on swinging arms that intersect each other's paths. Not only do you have to maneuver your character to pick up coins while avoiding obstacles, but you try to physically push your opponent so that he runs into the obstacles and misses the coins.

This morning, I hurt. My fingers are stiff, I've got a scraped knuckle from the air hockey paddle, a joystick blister from years of disuse, and my arms hurt from yanking that damn cannon pull-cord. But it was worth it for twelve and a half hours of fun.

Miscellaneous sighting: a CitiGroup T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: One Look. One Voice. One Reason. Disturbing historical allusion, anyone?

Well, there's 660 words that could have been written for NaNoWriMo. Oh well. (Or 666, if you count these.)

I'm not sure whether it's optimism or mean-spiritedness that makes me wish that ballots listed the candidates in alphabetical order, with no indication of the party to which they belong.

The optimist in me says, "Perhaps that would spur people to actually research the candidates' positions and voting histories, rather than simply voting along party lines."

To which the mean-spirited bastard responds, "Oh, come off it. You know they'd just write down a list of their party's candidates and take it into the booth with them. But I agree; if people are so lazy that the last actual political decision they make concerns which party to join, voting should be made as difficult as possible. And quite frankly, if voters are too stupid to understand the ballots, to hell with them."

Of course, now that we (at least here in Flori-duh) have shiny new computerized voting machines, it would be theoretically possible to enable more informed voting. Any time a candidate with a political history is on the ballot, his or her name could be accompanied by a button that pops up a complete listing of the candidate's voting record, financial statements, campaign promises (and how many were actually kept), etc. (That'll never happen, of course, because incumbent politicians desperately depend on an uninformed voting public with a tragically short memory.)

Mr. Optimism would also like to see Presidents refrain from campaigning for others while they're in office. They're supposed to be leading the entire nation justly, not taking time away from their office to promote their own cronies. It was despicable when Clinton did it, and it's despicable when Bush is doing it.

Mr. Mean-Spirited Bastard replies: "What are you, a complete moron? Presidents, singers, movie stars... politicians need these people to convince the public to vote for them, because the pathetic sheep are more swayed by celebrity than by reason."

Ah, well. It doesn't really matter. There's less and less difference between the Democrats and the Republicans — they're both full of power-hungry opportunists who serve themselves first, their parties second, and the people last (if at all) — and the third parties will never become viable enough to make a lasting impact.

Parting words from Mr. Optimist: "Well, at least we won't have to suffer through any more political ads for a while!"

All over the Web, people are reading the blogs of NaNoWriMo participants and saying "I don't care about your stupid novel! Entertain me in your usual fashion!"

Fortunately, I doubt anyone is normally entertained by my blog, so I don't have to worry about that.

I forgot to bring lunch to work, so rather than going out and spending money on food, I stayed at my desk and banged out a few pages, bringing myself up to half the number of words I should have by now. Wheee!

It helped that I've been rehearsing the chapter in my mind for the past three days, so I was able to just let it flow (though one section which I hadn't planned on leapt unbidden from my fingertips. It seemed to work out pretty well, so I left it in). Another thing that may have helped was the PopCap game Word Shark, a typing speed-builder that was released in beta version a few weeks ago.

The first chapter of my novel remains unfinished; I'd reached a roadblock, so instead of trying to break through it today, I wrote the entire second chapter. The first three chapters (and the prologue) are all expository, primarily mise-en-scene and an introduction to the protagonists.

Hopefully it'll be worth reading when all is said and done. I'm wrestling with the idea of posting excerpts. As Milk and Cheese say, Could be bliss, could be death.

Against my better judgement, I've put up an excerpt from the new Chapter Three in my user profile at NaNoWriMo.

"Write what you know" is the advice that's usually given to aspiring writers, so I did just that. In fact, much of the novel is, if not precisely what I know, at least a logical extension thereof.

Should you read the excerpt, bear in mind that the prologue and the first two chapters have already firmly established the novel as science fiction (set somewhere in the unspecified near future), and hopefully the final paragraph won't seem like so much of a cheat.

Recently, the amount of spam I've been receiving has increased by an order of magnitude. I assumed it was just the usual propagation of spammers' lists of valid email addresses, until I got one particular email a few minutes ago:

Dear JEFF,

Thank you for your interest in the SFI Affiliate Program!

Here is the registration information we received:

Name: JEFF LEE
Address: 5214 POMPEO WAY, TAMPA, FL 32689
Country: US
Email: godfrey@shipbrook.com
[...]

Not only is the address almost entirely incorrect (they got only the city and state right), but "Pompeo" is the last name of two of my closest friends.

So apparently, some cowardly douchebag — who knows me well enough to know who my friends are — has some sort of problem with me, but instead of actually confronting me about it, he or she is going around signing me up for spam and pyramid schemes.

That's right. Cowardly douchebag. Not enough spine to approach me personally, not enough intestinal fortitude to identify himself or herself. But that in itself gives me a pretty good idea who it is.

However, I don't want to blame someone falsely! Although the originators of this email appear to be some kind of pyramid scheme, they're at least ethical enough to send confirmation requests before signing someone up, and they have a "satisfactory" record with the Better Business Bureau. So perhaps they'll be good enough to provide me with the IP address whence the signup request came. Thanks to my Website's referrer logs, I know which IP addresses belong to the people I know.

And then a quick email to the offender's ISP should put things in order pretty quickly; that sort of thing is usually prohibited by most ISPs' Terms of Service agreements, and grounds for account termination.

For a couple of years, ever since I first saw CmdrTaco's MAME Cabinet, I've had the desire to build one for myself. Admittedly, the last time I did any woodworking was waaaaaay back in high school, and that didn't turn out so well (one of my deranged classmates stabbed my project repeatedly with a screwdriver).

Anyway, despite the possibility that I might end up making something that resembles Homer Simpson's spice rack more than a standup arcade game, I designed a cabinet last night:

(Click image for larger version)

My goal is to make this as inexpensively as possible. Buttons aren't that expensive — $1.65 for a genuine arcade pushbutton at Happ Controls, slightly more expensive from Ultimarc. Basic arcade joysticks only run about $15 each. Trigger joysticks (like you'd see on a Tron machine) and spinner controls both cost over $100, so I think I'll be building my own instead.

Rather than spending a couple hundred dollars on a disappointingly small computer monitor, I'll hit the pawn shops with which Tampa is overflowing, and look for a decent 27-inch TV with an S-Video input for under $100, then stick in the cheapest video card I can find with S-Video output. A $6 keyboard can easily be hacked to provide a multiple-control input device. Basic hardware supplies and a cheap mouse can be turned into a respectable spinner.

The most difficult choice is the control layout. Two of my favorite games are Tron and Mad Planets, both of which require a trigger joystick and a spinner. On the other hand, I also like simultaneous multiplayer games such as Gauntlet and Joust. But how to set up adequate controls for both kinds of games?

Simple: I make the control panel detachable, and just swap it out as needed. Three ports on the main cabinet (joystick, mouse/trackball, and keyboard) should serve for any kind of layout that I can imagine. If I build a sliding drawer for the motherboard and CPU and bolt them in sideways, I can have the rest of the lower cabinet for storing unused control panels.

The hardest part looks like the construction of a spinner. Since Karen loves Tempest, but finds it difficult to play using a keyboard, mouse or joystick, I'll build her a standalone spinner — which will serve as practice for me, and (hopefully) give her a way to play one of her favorite arcade games.

Assuming, of course, that she can play Tempest with a spice rack.

Tangent: I tried to find an image of Homer Simpson's DIY project, but was wholly unsuccessful. I did, however, find an image of Rooster Spice.

Why don't any of the online Web-page translation services include Dutch-to-English as one of the options?

When browsing through my referrer logs, I frequently find hits on my raytraced graphics coming from various Dutch bulletin boards and forums. It would be nice to know what they're saying, but alas, Babelfish et alia don't do Dutch.

I'd just learn it myself, but I've tried to learn enough languages in the past that I know I can't do so unless I've got someone to practice it with on a regular basis.

For years, there's been a tantalizing fragment of a broadside ballad, its title known only from a scrap of paper used to bind a book in the seventeenth century.

A couple of years ago, a complete copy of the ballad was found; the only known surviving copy. Its title is amusing, at least to a Star Trek geek such as myself:

De parvis grandis a cervus erit.
"Small things will make a large pile."

Why is there no Which Mystery Men Character Are You quiz? Apparently, Comedy Central used to have one, but it was a marketing gimmick (for Dockers brand pants, the official khakis of Champion City), and in any case it's no longer there.

It's probably just as well. With my luck on these tests, I wouldn't end up as any of the actual Mystery Men, but as Dr. Heller — the eccentric inventor who lives in an abandoned amusement park and visits nursing homes to pick up women.

For crying out loud. Both Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman) and Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off) have been charged with possession of child pornography? That's just sad. Not to mention sick.

Yesterday, in addition to my arcade controls, I received the Fellowship of the Rings 4-DVD set from Amazon.

This afternoon, I got an email from Amazon letting me know my order had shipped.

I primarily use the Opera Web browser. Being the cheapskate that I am, I use "sponsored" mode, in which I don't have to pay for the program, but a relatively small banner ad appears in the upper-right corner of the user interface. It's easily ignored, unless it flashes madly.

For the past few weeks, I've been noticing more and more German-language ads appearing up there, and sometime this week I noticed that I wasn't getting English advertisements anymore (other than the ones from Opera itself). I barely remember any German from college; just enough to know that the most frequent banner is pitching cellphones from €1.29 (per day, I assume).

This morning, they broke up the monotony with an ad in French.

Last weekend, I made a scratching post for the cats.

At first, only one cat used it. Then, when another cat started showing interest in using it, the first cat got territorial about "her" scratching post, and chased the other cat away.

The irony? The one who uses it is the only one of the cats who's been declawed.

Step One is complete. Though it was fraught with delays (such as waiting overnight for a new cordless drill to charge), I've completed a standalone arcade spinner control for Karen, so she can now play Tempest to her heart's content — and it also acted as my gauge for whether or not I'd have the skills to build a MAME cabinet.

For although no actual woodworking was involved, the idea of building a precision controller device out of common hardware supplies and a cannibalized mouse was probably the scariest part of the whole cabinet project.

The hardware was the easy part. I did as much drilling through metal as I could using an old-fashioned hand drill, but then I needed to stop work overnight to charge the cordless drill's batteries because the 3/4" hole saw just wasn't working on the hand drill. A few nuts and bolts, a couple of tie plates, a patio door bearing, a PVC test cap, a junction-box cover and a rubber wheel later, and I had the mechanical part of the spinner finished. I bought a cheap mouse and threw away everything but the innards and the cable. I decided to add two arcade buttons to the spinner, so I used a larger project box than the plans called for, and I desoldered not only the horizontal optical components from the mouse's circuit board, but the button switches as well.

The arcade buttons went in easily. The optical sensors were a pain in the ass; for not only did I have to solder them onto a custom PCB, I had to also run wires to their original locations on the mouse's PCB. The fourth time was the charm. The first time, one of the copper traces on the custom PCB came off. The second time, I got everything soldered perfectly, and then the custom PCB snapped when I tried to enlarge its bracket's mounting hole. The third time, another copper trace came off. But the fourth time, everything went swimmingly.

It works like a dream; there's no stutter in the movement, and it feels great. I tried it out on Tempest, and with my first game I more than doubled my previous high score. Having the right controller really does help, I guess.

So... the big experiment succeeded, and I'm confident enough to start laying out my first control panel design.