A day

Creepy video from the other side of the Uncanny Valley. People torturing a robot toy dinosaur that was programmed, er, too well. It is a brilliant way to keep kids from breaking expensive robots, because it's difficult to turn off your empathy and remind yourself it's just a machine.

Today was the first day where everyone was moved to the new half of the office. Some people were out, but not many, and our half is now much more quiet and pleasant. The company is naturally divided into programmers and people who bother programmers, and the latter group are now comfortably far away from us.

Their side is a good example of a decent design ruined by a single decision that, not unlike a black hole, sucks all remaining good vibes into it, leaving only the cold, dark void. See, someone decided that it was too noisy with all the phones and such, so to reduce the noise, they installed noise generators.

This is only almost as stupid as it sounds.

Apparently white noise reduces the annoyingness of other noise, so white noise generators can drown things out with pleasing static. However, while the idea was only mostly terrible, the implementation is absolutely godawful. It sounds like the air conditioners are going full blast all the time, and it's only when someone pulled the cord on the noisemaker to demonstrate that I realized how bad those other side people have it.

Anyway, I'm having people over on Saturday, so I have been craving some Pac Man Vs. (ask Tucker, he explains it well). I went today at lunch and got a Wavebird. You need three, or the cords get tangled.

Gamestop really doesn't want to sell Wavebirds. Rather than having them with the Gamecube stuff, they were hidden with some other crappy junk on the front of the counter. They had two, each $18, one had no analog stick top, (the pole was there, no round thing), and the other had no battery cover. To their credit, the guy did sell me the cover from the no-stick-top one with the no-cover one, so I did end up with one complete Wavebird, even if they were different colors so it's mismatched. Still, how come they still have Xbox controllers, and I think even PSX controllers? The Cube isn't that dead, is it?