FYI: Kentucky Bike Laws

This is a pet peeve of mine, but every bicyclist and motorist (car driver) should know, by heart, the Bicyclists Rules of the Road for Metro Louisville. Read it. Read it again. Learn it. These rules are not new and if you have taken the drivers test in the state you have already been required to know it.

The main things you should know in Kentucky:

• Bicyclists CANNOT use sidewalks. Period.
• Motorists MUST share the road with bicyclists.

Any driver that honks at bicyclists for using the lanes that they have as much of right to (not to mention are required to use) for "being slow" because the driver is an impatient prick should have their license suspended because they aren't following the rules of the road.

Anyway, I'm tired of getting swiped by bicyclists on the sidewalk who don't even have the common courtesy to warn pedestrians as they pass, much less the knowledge that they are breaking the law.

On Issue Tracker Reference Schemes

I'm jumping back and forth between working on my big "secret" project and getting some good code into my pet project manager Darcsforge [1]. One of the oldest (now) pieces of Darcsforge is my pet issue tracker, nicknamed 'orkin', and it was time to renovate it to better fit with the later pieces I've worked on. One of the big things I re-debated was the use of "Issue Numbers". Every Issue Tracker I've ever dealt with has used Issue Numbers as the main tool to reference an Issue [2]. The big Pro for Issue Numbers is their terseness: hundreds of thousands of issues can be addressed by a sequence of 6 numbers. The big Con: terseness. Sure you might be able to remember the difference between Issue 34 and Issue 43 but at a certain threshold you have to start referring to cheat sheets or the Issue Tracker itself to figure things out. Quick: What's the difference between Issue 135736 and Issue 135637? Issue numbers don't work well for us people and are often much more artifacts of back-end systems (auto-numbered database primary keys) than artifacts for human consumption.

Django encourages web designers to design "humane" URLs. Take this blog site, for example, I could just as easily use /entry/343/, but I specifically chose the /2007/mar/14/issue-tracker-reference-schemes/ format because it says a lot more to the human mind and is a lot friendlier. It breaks into two major pieces, the posted date (3/14/2007 or March 14 2007 or whatever other mental format you prefer) and the 'slug', which is a newspaper term by way of Django, which in this case is issue-tracker-reference-schemes. The address there tells me when I posted the blog entry and something about the subject of the ...

Deal or No Deal: A Bird in the Hand, Two in the Bush, You Don't Know Jack

First of all, there is new entertainments to be found at You Don't Know Jack's Net Game 2 Beta [1].

Last Monday, having watched Deal or No Deal only for its value in signaling that Heroes has started it came to me to do it as a school project. So I wrote up a quick merciless web-version called "Acceptable Compromise or Unacceptable Compromise" and populated it with a trio of penny-pinching Robotic Bankers versus a random assortment of friends. I may not be an expert on Deal or No Deal, but I now know way too much about the game and the way people play the game...

I'll save most of my commentary for the final report, but the obvious thing that I've noticed is that generally players fall into two categories: those that follow "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and those that do not. Some players have a decent idea of the probabilities involved in the game and others do not. A bank offer is often worth more than any possibility of having a certain case, because one is "cash in hand" and the other is "maybe there is twice as much in this bush". Obviously I'm overgeneralizing, but perhaps the big thing here is that in the end the game is no more than a lottery and neither type of player really ever, in the long run, "wins".

I think I myself have become a member of a third class in the course of this work. I'm really evaluating the performance of the banker algorithms and the measurement by which they are tested is not the final payout or the final "deal" (wanted ($1,000,000 vs. payout) or won (payout vs. "own" case)) but instead ...

Restaurant of the Moment: Mimi's Cafe

It takes a lot to earn my wrath, but Mimi's Cafe is awful. It's a very French-style cafe chain from California pretending to be a New Orleans cafe with "international flavor". It's a wholly owned subsidiary of Bob Evans, for those that enjoy the "which chain owns which other chain game" like I do. A quick glance at the scoreboard:

• It's a publicly-traded chain.
• It's from California and pretends to be from New Orleans.
• Few items lacked a cream sauce
• Prices were huge, portions were huge, half the restaurant's patrons were huge

That last one, the PPP ratio, I think may be something that I start to examine more often. My appetite drops dramatically the heavier the average person in the room is. I'm curious if fat people tend to go to unhealthy restaurants more often and in my experience for the most part that is the case...

Regardless, I ordered a salad. It was bad. I'm amazed every time I see a restaurant brutally murder a salad preparation.

I don't foresee me ever again having a reason to eat at this awful chain.

Sam and Max meet Star Wars Canon

I certainly gave up on Star Wars (which I have since the last film pronounced "dead to me"), but I am glad that there are still some fun to be found in the "Expanded Universe" (C-Canon and S-Canon works). (I can no longer stand and in some cases outright hate G-Canon.) Here's the thing that amused me recently: Max (Wookieepedia) of Sam and Max (Ye old unofficial fan site from my old International House of Mojo stomping grounds, from whence this is via, btw) is considered (C-)canon in Star Wars, due to lending his bounty-hunting skills as a sidekick to Kyle Katarn in DF:JK for a couple of missions... Dark Forces (the first game, not the Jedi Knight follow-ups) is still one of the few Star Wars computer games I recall fondly.

AdventureCon

I'm certainly tempted by AdventureCon, but I'm afraid I probably won't be able to make it without some sort of sponsorship. It has three major names already signed up to appear: Scott Adams, Al Lowe, and Jane Jensen. It is attempting to capitalize on the amazing convergence that this year marks both the 30th anniversary of Zork and the 20th anniversary of Leisure Suit Larry.