Otaku No Zoku

At the recent BayCon Science Fiction & Fantasy convention held in San Mateo California I had the pleasure of being moderator on several panels, one of these, which took place on Sunday afternoon, was “The Top Ten Gadgets That Changed The World.”

The debate was lively and at times, loud with full audience participation.

I captured notes on my laptop and audio with my Olympus DS-40 voice recorder. I apologise but the batteries ran down on my DS-40 ran down a few minutes before the end of the panel so we are missing the final debate. I’m missing the last ten minutes of the panel unfortunately.

The notes below are direct from the ones I took at the panel with no editing, so it includes spelling mistakes and poor grammar.

If you want to sweat about your typing and spelling, try typing live on to a video display projected in front of 200 people whilst holding down a conversation too.

Download the audio of the panel. (22.6MB)

Philip Gust - CEO of software co. Inventor/Gadgeteer
Lee Felsenstein - Designer of lost computers.
Jay Freeman - Scientist and player
Justin Lloyd (moderator) - video game developer.

The “aye, “no” and “on the fence” at the end of each entry were added in the last few minutes using a democratic process of getting the audience to shout out whether they thought the gadget was worthy of being in the top ten list. Unfortunately we ran out of time to actually sort the list into a top ten.
Transistor - aye (Jay Freeman)
Wright Flyer - aye (Jay Freeman)
Apple II - on the fence (Jay Freeman)
Portable Phone - yes (Jay Freeman)
AK47 - on the fence (Jay Freeman)
Credit Card - no (Jay Freeman)
Television - yes
Movies -on the fence
Model T - yes
Meteorological Satellites - yes
Liquid Fueled Rocket Motor - on the fence (Jay Freeman)
Flip-flop - on the fence (Lee Felsenstein)
Cell phone/Mobile Phone - yes (Justin Lloyd/Lee Felsenstein)
Bloody PC - on the fence (Lee Felsenstein)
Raster Scan CRT - huh? (Lee Felsenstein)
Electronic Hand Calculator yes (Philip Gust)
VCR/Tivo - yes (Philip Gust)
Answering Machine - on the fence (Philip Gust)
Car Radio - no (Philip Gust)
Univac 1 - no (Philip Gust)
GPS - yes (Philip Gust)
GPS - yes (Justin Lloyd)
iPod - no (Justin Lloyd)
Air Conditioner - yes (Justin Lloyd)
Candidate- “Aluminium based anti-perspirant”, aerosal can - on the fence
Candidate - photocopier - yes
Candidate - Post-It notes on the fence
Candidate - RADAR - yes
Candidate - Search engine “Altavista” - no
Candidate - White out/Tippex/Liquid paper - no
Candidate - Super glue - no

Lee Felsenstein - What is a classic design?
Where is the gee whiz factor?

Definition of PC/Univac/Apple II

Candidate - Scanning Tunneling Microscope, precursor to molecular microscope - on the fence
Candidate - Apollo programme - no
Candidate - Atomic bomb - yes

Is a transistor a gadget? But the transistor radio?
Pentode tube - huh
Candidate - Heterodyne Receiver - on the fence

Model T - First breakout automobile product, like the iPod.
Car Radio - made family road trips practical and tolerable, radio was their entertainment, larger captive advertising audience.
Liquid Fueled Rocket Motor - It lead to the Apollo programme.
GPS - changing the future, guided bombs, UAV, cell phone location spam

Candidate - Microwave oven, LCD, LED - yes
Candidate - Nylons, synthetic fabrics, “ropes” - on the fence
Candidate - LASER - yes
Explanation - AK47 - enabling tech for revolution

Is 100 years enough?
Candidate - Portable PC - yes
Candidate - CNC - yes
Candidate - Carbonless copy paper - no
Candidate - Autonomous and industrial robots - yes

What will be the future gadgets?
Digital paper
Batteries that never discharge

Audio recording & notes will be available at http://www.otakunozoku.com/

Suggestions
What ten gadgets changed the fannish world?
What are the best ten gadgets of all time?

Download the audio of the panel. (22.6MB)

Somehow I always manage to dine with the weirdos. I am sure if you dine out regularly you will recognise many of the traits that follow in other people you dine with.

Take this post as it is written, a tongue-in-cheek poke at all of those people who have dined with me over the years. You know who you are.

1. Chew with your mouth closed.
2. Don’t speak with your mouth full of food.
3. Brush your teeth at least once in the 12 hours previous to being in my company.
4. Do not masticate louder than my pets.
5. Learn to use a knife & fork properly. “American Style” merely suggests you should consider having your next dinner date at McDonald’s.
6. Do not endlessly fidget by bouncing your leg, drumming your fingers, tapping your eating utensils.
7. Do not ask me a question, or begin a topic of conversation, only to answer your cell phone half-way through, and do this at least 5 times within an hour.
8. Do not take an hour to decide what to eat, if when entering the restaurant it is announced that they will close in 15 minutes and the restaurateur who is a personal friend has allowed us to be seated.
9. Taking longer to decide what to order — even though you have ate at the restaurant on more than one occasion and you always order the same thing every time — than it does for me to order my meal, consume it at a leisurely pace and wonder what is for desert. It is a sure sign you probably need therapy.
10. The above rule applies doubly so when we visit a “fast food” place such as “In’n'Out Burger” that contains precisely four items on the menu* (not including soft drinks) and I have time to finish the thick shake, my burger and warm the engine up on the car before you have decided precisely what kind of burger you want (burger, burger with cheese, double burger, double burger with cheese, how hard can it be people?)
11. Do not host a 30-minute phone conversation with your boss/significant other/OBGYN during the meal. Any phone conversation that is not a justifiable emergency or lasts longer than 20 seconds is not suitable for the dinner table.
12. Do not make “fingernails on black board” noises with your knife when cutting food every time you use it.
13. Do not analyse the contents or ingredients of our meals. I’m a better cook than you and I already know what’s in my food. Showing your cleverness by masticating thoughtfully then declaring the list of ingredients is like listening to someone describe their Yu-Gi-Oh card deck in exquisite detail.
14. Please belch after the meal is over, and not in my direction.
15. Learn to eat spaghetti and noodles correctly. I don’t appreciate your food on my shirt, plate, etc.
16. The amount of saliva in your mouth should be less than the amount of water in your glass so that I don’t wind up with my food having a watery texture every time you talk to me.
17. You are permitted to breathe during your sixty minute monologue without fear of interruption.
18. Bathe! If your aroma is stronger than the Italian food that uses lots of garlic it is a sure sign of a personal hygiene problem.

And I’ll mention these again because I think they are really important:

1. Learn to use a knife and fork properly.
2. Chew with your mouth closed.
3. Bathe!

* Except for their secret menu, which contains another six items.

I can finally talk about our latest project — “Shrek The Third” for Microsoft Windows. I’m happy with the way the game turned out and made me realise that perhaps there is a market for casual “platformer” games after all.

The game has been approved by Microsoft and Activision and all of those people that matter and we’ve added it to our portfolio of titles. The movie is out on May 18th so we will all be attending a screening of it as a company outing.

With our current office expansion underway and the year not even half over we are planning on having two more projects out the door by the time that Christmas rolls around. I’ll post more when I am able to talk about them.

A personal friend of mine, George Moudry, has been tinkering with automated code conversion for a year or two now and has finally come up with something that actually appears to be approaching usable functionality. The Code2Code website takes regular C++ code and converts it to C#. The software is not yet Beta, and only the first version so don’t expect too much out of it but it is certainly interesting to see what kind of results the converter produces based on code you feed it. Try it out as George is looking for feedback on what areas to improve it.