The "core" of the Black Gazza Warden computer doesn't stritcly have to be pretty to look at; the only interface most people see is those terminals. But I like to make even purely utilitarian things look nice, so this is what I came up with for the Warden Computer Core:



Yep, that's an enormous stack of Mac Xserves and yep, that's a gnarly electrical panel. There are four of those. They should be enough.

Remember Christopher Jones' son in District 9? The son had been "home" for long enough to remember it and want to go back. But they've been on Earth for twenty years. How does that work?

Scrollbars are an astonishingly cool: On a GUI window of limited size you can show part of a document and show how much of the document you're seeing. The indicator is also a tool to change which part of the document you're looking at. Drag the scrollbar up and down and your view into the document similarly moves up and down.

This seems conter-intuitive, but it's really not. Consider a document as a very tall thing. At first, you look at the top of the document, and so the scroll bar is at the top of its little track. If you want to look at more of the document, you click-drag the scrollbar downwards, which is the direction you're scanning in. The contents of the window move upwards. (This is a thing that's confusing only to a small number of people. When you get in a glass elevator on the top floor and push the button for the first floor, you move down. Meanwhile, everything around you moves up. This non-contradiction is basic to how the universe works. You can't expect the things outside of the elevator to move down as it moves down.)

Apple UI experts have decided that elevators and documents and a generation of scroll-bar-using computer users are wrong. We've been doing it backwards all these years. Lion has an irritating-as-snot new assumption and default setting for the direction that scrolling takes you: moving the scroll wheel is the same as swiping the touchpad and the default is the "natural" direction: swipe upwards or roll the scroll wheel upwards and the document moves up.

Apple really wants you to use a trackpad instead of a mouse, and it really wants you to change twenty-five years of training. IMNSHO this is an error.

I'm using Quicken 2004 on my MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard. Quicken 2004 is running PPC, so on my MacBook Pro it runs under Rosetta. Rosetta is no longer supported on Lion, so if I want to migrate, which I don't, I have to upgrade Quicken. This is a daunting task. I poked about Intuit's web site to find out how to upgrade Quicken 2004. One of the steps was backwards to Classic, which seems like nonsense. So I wrote Intuit customer support a simple question.

I've been running Quicken 2004 on OS X SnowLeopard, but support for this version went away under Lion, so I am considering the purchase of Quicken 2007 or other product. Can Quicken 2007 import from Quicken 2004?

Udit G. repied,

Thank you for contacting Quicken Customer Care.

We have released new Quicken 2007 for Mac OS X Lion compatible. This edition is fully compatible with Lion and also with Snow Leopard. You can try it, as it comes with 60 days money back guarantee and this product is available for $14.99 only. Please visit the link below for more details.

http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance-software/quicken-2007-osx-lion.jsp

Quicken 2007 for Mac OS X Lion compatible and Quicken Essentials for Mac can only convert the data from Quicken 2005 for Mac, Quicken 2006 and Quicken 2007 for Mac.

You can also use our phone support for more pre sales queries and for placing an order.

To call phone support regarding this issue, you can visit the following URL and submit an incident post. This will give you a number to call the phone support:
https://quicken.custhelp.com/app/contact/plvl1/win
Phone support is available from 5AM - 5PM PST, Mon-Fri.

If you require additional information or feel that the above resource(s) did not assist with supporting your issue, then please feel free to reply to this email.

You can also contact Chat Support, by visiting this URL: https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/quicken.cfg/php/enduser/chat.php
Chat Support is available anytime, 24x7.


Sincerely,
Udit G.
Quicken Customer Care

That was a correct but not very informative answer. So I clarified my question.

Thank you for your quick response.
My original question was how to migrate from Quicken 2004 to the current product. I'm already aware of the limitations of the current product that you listed here. I tried looking for the information on your web site, but the closest I came was that I could convert to some other format with an application that runs only on the Classic OS.
So my question is really very simple: How do I convert my Quicken 2004 data to a format that the current version can use? Is there some intermediate format that some other version can convert for me? Where can I get this other version?

Yet another response along the same lines as before. Anuj replied,

Thank you for contacting Quicken Customer Care.

I would like to inform you that we can only import Quicken for Mac 2005, 2006 or 2007 data into new Quicken for MAC lion. not able to convert 2004 data file, as you are using Mac 2004 in this case, We need to start from the scratch.

I hope the above mentioned information will clarify the issue.

If you require additional information or feel that the above resource(s) did not assist with supporting your issue, then please feel free to reply to this email.

You can also contact Chat Support, by visiting this URL: https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/quicken.cfg/php/enduser/chat.php
Chat Support is available anytime, 24x7.

To call phone support regarding this issue, you can visit the following URL and submit an incident post. This will give you a number to call the phone support:
https://quicken.custhelp.com/app/contact/plvl1/win
Phone support is available from 5AM - 5PM PST, Mon-Fri.

Sincerely,
Anuj
Quicken Customer Care

Well, for fuck's sake. Am I always going to get the same stupid answer? Try again…

Thank you very much for telling me yet again what I already knew. I hope that this is not typical of the level of customer support you provide.
When Quicken 2004 was updated to Quicken 2005, could that read the 2004 files? How about 2006: could that read 2004 files? Let's take it one step further: Can Quicken 2007 read 2004 files?
What I'm getting at is that maybe you can keep me as a customer by providing me with an upgrade path from Quicken 2004. If you can't, then I might as well explore the other products that are out there. It's my understanding that some products on the Apple Store can read formats that Quicken 2004 can export.

I can't be any clearer. Provide a migration solution or lose me as a customer. Ravindra Pratap replied,

Thank you for contacting Quicken Customer Care.

I can understand your concern but I regret to inform you that it is not possible to convert the data files from Quicken 2004 to Quicken 2007 mac lion. You can convert the files from Quicken 2004 to Quicken 2005 06 or 07 but I regret to inform you that the intermediate version is not available. Please open the link given below for more information.

http://quicken.intuit.com/support/help/upgrading-and-conversion/quicken-mac-2007-os-x-lion-compatible/GEN84015.html

If you require additional information or feel that the above resource(s) did not assist with supporting your issue, please feel free to reply to this email.

You can also contact our Chat Support by visiting this URL - https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/quicken.cfg/php/enduser/chat.php. Chat Support is available 24x7.

To call phone support regarding this issue, you can visit the following URL and submit an incident post. This will give you a number to call the phone support:

https://quicken.custhelp.com/app/contact/plvl1/win

Phone support is available from 5AM - 5PM PST, Mon-Fri.

Sincerely,

Ravindra Pratap

Quicken Customer Care

So they have a few problems with their customer care.

• Emails in a thread don't go back to the person who initially handled it.
  
• Customer service reps don't read the entire thread and are perfectly happy to spew out the same canned non-answers.
  
• Even when I told them quite plainly what I need to stay their customer, they are not wiling to provide it.
  

I found a version of Quicken 2007 for Mac on eBay for sixty bucks, but then I still have to buy Intuit's latest version. So at this point I'm thinking that I'll either set up an old Mac specifically to run Quicken 2004 (which has its own security advantages) or I'll search on the Apple App Store for some other personal accounting product not from Intuit.

I took some screen shots featuring the new AI terminals.

Here's one terminal in he cellblock. I took this one from pretty far away and narrowed my field of view. It gives a nice flattened aspect that reminds me of some anime scenes.


This is the same terminal from behind with a more conventional field of view.


And this is what someone RPing the AI will see from a similar location.

There was some discussion about Zero Suit Master Chief out of his armor at http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2012/05/16/zero-suit-master-chief-turnabout-is-fair-play-except-for-your-spine/ , which links to a really yummy image here: http://kevinbolk.deviantart.com/art/Zero-Suit-Master-Chief-182780088

I thought about this more over coffee before I put on my own crash pads and investigate some bugs. On the one hand, I get how women superheroes and heroine sidechicks are too often shown in awkward sexy poses and wearing the skimpiest and most impractical armor possible. That’s really dumb for a lot of “practical” reasons (practical within the boundaries of suspension of disbelief for the genre) and because it reduces the female characters to mere sex objects.

(I quite enjoyed reading C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur series and her Union-Alliance books; they have some good strong female characters including a starship captain I would not want to cross!)

On the other hand, I quite enjoy the recent art depicting male superheroes in such revealing costumes and poses. They’re much better than the standard fare designed not to upset the straight boys. I guess I’m speaking from a position of male privilege now: I don’t mind seeing men sexualized that way; I rather like the idea of being sexualized … and I just realized why and what needs to be done about it (aside from putting me in spandex).

If you’re an artist and make such very cool images, I think it would be appropriate if you dialed it up to eleven. Make an ensemble image that shows the women as The Strong Characters—good looking but not overtly sexualized—and the men as the subservient sex objects in diaphanous chaps and brass jock straps.

Oh, ah. I have work to get to now.

http://inagist.com/all/201654570596839425/

inagist.com, a twitter wannabe, published a gist from Deepak Chopra, which states that "Atheism is a cult with a small following."

Using the Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame we can determine whether Deepak Chopra is a cult leader.

• Internal Control - members of his organization have no rights in the organization
  
• External Control - the gist shows that he wants to exert social and political control
  
• Wisdom/Knowledge Claimed - a lot
  
• Wisdom/Knowledge Credited - a lot
  
• Dogma - a lot
  
• Recruiting - a lot
  
• Front Groups - no known front groups
  
• Wealth - he's rich
  
• Sexual Manipulation - meh
  
• Sexual Favoritism - meh
  
• Censorship - meh
  
• Isolation - meh
  
• Dropout Control - meh
  
• Violence - none
  
• Paranoia - The just-published gist suggests paranoia.
  
• Grimness - Oprah and Deepak were going to be married, but it was called off when they realized she would be Oprah Chopra. Deepak is pretty serious when it comes to people who question his authority.
  
• Surrender of Will - This whole business of quantum consciousness connecting you to the universal one is pretty suspicious.
  
• Hypocrisy - He teaches quantum woo even though it's been explained to him numerous times that quantum physics has nothing to do with it.
  
  So is Deepak Chopra a cult leader? Decide for yourself.

The other week one of my friends on Second Life suggested he wanted to roleplay the Artificial Intelligence computer that runs Black Gazza prison. I thought that was a good idea.

A couple years ago I had built "cameras" that sit in one spot and sequentially aim at everyone within range. They sent their coordinates to a central chair. When you sat on that chair, your in-world camera position and angle got set to match what the "camera" object was doing. There were several of these cameras around the station, and you could sit and watch any one of them at a time. The protocol was rather chatty and they probably contributed a little to the system lag. So that's the code I started with.

… and promptly discarded everything but the final camera-aiming code. I spent about a week just thinking about all the features I wanted the system to have. Then I designed the outlines of a protocol: who talks to whom on what channels under what circumstances. There's a single "registration" channel that every device listens to and talks on if it has something important to say, such as "I'm registering" or "everybody register". Every device has its own dedicated channel, calculated by catenating the strings that make up its XYZ coordinates. This gives every device a unique channel but it means you can't have two devices closer than a meter. Oh, darn.

The first devices I made are the Brain Seat and some terminals. The terminals are about 300 lines of code. They know how to get their location and rotation; they register with the Brain Seat, they receive notices to "activate" (which means to light up), and they handle text-chat relay to the sitter who could be meany tens of meters away. The Brain Seat is about 500 lines of code. It keeps the list of devices and lets whoever's sitting on it choose which terminal to activate. You sit on the Brain Seat and you become HAL.

I had two baic models on which to base the roleplay aspects. The first is where a person becomes the planetary brain entity. Star Trek had a few instances where someone would get kidnapped and made to replace an aging planetary brain. (Brain? What is brain?) Babylon 5 has the Caretaker of the planet below. In one episode, the old caretaker was dying, so they replaced him with an old friend of Delenn's, who suffered an hour of butt-hurt and then got over it. Battlestar Galactica has the base ship entities who live their lives in milk.

The other major variation is where the entity is artificial. HAL 9000 is the archetype here. I suppose the computers in The Forbin Project and War Games are other examples.

Based on the implications to roleplaying, I lean toward making this a computer, not a kidnapped brain. The Kidnapped Brain makes for major character-changing events, and you sort of have to limit who all can play the Brain. You can't have a new one every week. The Computer is a separate character from any player's main character and thus things that happen to it don't directly affect the main character. It will take some explaining: The terminals, when active, do tell the name of the person who's playing the computer role. This is to avoid a few kinds of trouble. I want the person playing the role of the computer to have some accountability. If your name is on your actions, then you're less likely to be a dick. The other is the rule against spy devices: text chat relays. But this device works in both directions and it's not secret, so this is not spying. The terminals light up rather obviously when active.

There was a discussion about the name of the device. I didn't want to call it the Central Computer or the Core or any of a number of stupid names from '50s sci fi movies. So people came up with "Warden" as the name of the computer … which makes certain kind of evil sense, seeing as how this is the computer that runs a prison.

I want to add more features: the ability to zap inmates and cage anyone, for example. I also want to write new door and cage software so that any of these are under control of the Warden. ("Open pod bay doors, HAL.")

Finally, I want to add RLV. Whoever is RP-ing the brain will have some severe RLV restrictions, pretty much all of them. No building or accessing inventory, no clicking on anything, no unsitting until your time is up, no incoming or outgoing IMs, no maps, no accepting teleport offers, and whatever else I can think of. My thinking is twofold. First, as the Station Warden, you're pretty damn powerful, so you as a gameplayer have to give up some things. Second, it's a kind of bondage.

I might get evil and *require* RLV, so it unsits you if you don't have it working. I might also write a system that recaptures you if you crash and then log back in again.

Oh, damn. I just thought of an evil thing to do, but that requires this to work on the kidnapping-a-live-brain trope. You can safeword out of being the brain, but the consequence is that your avatar gets ejected out into space.

Come visit my sim on Second Life: Black Gazza. May your stay be as long as you deserve.

Today while waiting for the bus the line we were in split into two, one for the not-mine bus that had just arrived and one for all the other buses. I saw a good-looking guy walk by… military haircut, goatee, blue work shirt, denim jeans, belt, black service boots. He set off my gaydar and I just wanted to give him a nice friendly smile. I guess I was too obviously cruising him, for he said, "Hi, there! You look familiar." I realized that the only place we could possibly have seen one another would not be good to mention right then and there, so I said, "Yep; could be," as he got on the bus. He'll be wondering who I am …

Let's see now: short hair, goatee, black cap, purple Henley, blue jeans, black leather belt, hiking boots. If that doesn't set off someone's gaydar, it may need recalibrating.

I believe in love and kindness
I believe in helping hands
I believe in strong opinions
I believe in taking stands
I believe cooperation
Overcomes the steepest odds
I believe we have a fighting chance

I don’t believe in gods.

Read the rest at —Digital Cuttlefish: National “Ask An Atheist” Day