Microsoft is getting creepy. From their malicious software removal tool: "Malicious Software Removal. Before execution of the software, the software will check for and remove certain malicious software (“Malware”) from your device, which is listed and periodically updated by family at www.support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890830."

...listed and periodically updated by family? Am I the only one whose first thought was "please don't try to pretend like you're family, Microsoft, I'd rather keep you at arm's length"? Or does nobody actually read licence agreements but me? The best part is that no software is listed at that link, let alone categorized by family (which is, I assume, what they were trying to say.)

email

I'm amazed at how productive I can be when I'm at work and waiting for a compile to finish. Something to do with the huge code restructuring we've recently had broke my build entirely, and I've spent the last four or five hours trying to get it to work - and it takes at least five minutes to test every attempted fix, but those five minutes aren't really enough to get into a problem, so I've been working on little things. Once those ran out, it was time to check emails! So I'm proud to say that from the day's start of just over 1700 unread emails in my inbox, I'm now down to 1565! Woo.

http://vancouver.ca/electionresults2008/ has the yesterday's municipal election - particularly interesting, to me, is how the mayoral vote maps across the city.

MUDs turn 30

Today marks the 30th birthday of MMORPGs. No, EverQuest isn't that old.

Richard Bartle, of the infamous Bartle test, comments on it briefly.

If you've never played a MUD or a MOO, I highly recommend it. My first exposure to one was in grade 8, when some politician gave a 'speech' to a bunch of educators and students in one, and I was building (M**-speak for writing the code and descriptions that provide rooms, characters, objects, actions, etc. that populate a text-based virtual world) that week, if not the very next day. The good ones are strange, fascinating places populated by wild people who act in-character the whole time (and the best ones have some extraordinarily strange characters). The worst are mere hack-and-slash, with no room for expression amongst the players (vs. participants). There's a middle ground, where direction is provided by challenges and advancement but where you're not stuck fighting orc 1, orc 2, orc 3...

Anyways. Happy birthday, MUD1.

Elections stock market!

In a wonderful example of synchronicity, I was pointed at the UBC Elections Stock Market today. This is an amazing little thing - when I was a kid I worked this market hard for three or four elections, back on that monochrome computer in the basement, and then on my 386 when I got my first computer. I never lost money; once I only barely broke even, and once I roughly doubled my initial investment, and the rest varied. They used to have a $100 investment cap unless some conditions were met, iirc.

The method is straightforward: a stock for a given party in the MP market will be worth, after the election, the %age of the seats that that party got. A stock in the majority market is worth $1 if that guess is correct (eg. if it's a minority, then all majority stocks are worth nothing except for the 'no majority' option). This means that you can always buy a block of all parties or of all possible majority outcomes.

Unfortunately, my best former strategy - buy loads of blocks of majority stocks, sell the ones that are very unlikely whenever they spike, then in the last day or two as that gambler's choice becomes more and more certainly false, buying them back at fractions of the price (and cashing whole blocks back in before the actual election, not that it matters either way once a set is held) - doesn't work very well when the majority options are reduced to liberal, cpc, and neither. C'mon, if people will give me 4% odds that the NDP will take a majority, let me take those people's money!

In any case, there isn't much time left, but if you've always fancied yourself a good political analyst and you'd like to give day-trading a shot, I used to have a *lot* of fun with this, and I highly recommend it.