I'm back in Denver again, and after the travel disaster I had last week, I have to rave about the experience I had tonight. I'd always heard very good things about jetBlue, but I never had a chance to fly them until recently. My first jetBlue experience was back in April. It was as good as expected. Having DirectTV is really nice. On the way back, we were a little late and they couldn't get the TVs to work so they mailed everyone a $20 voucher for the inconvenience. (a make-good from an airline without me having to do anything for a problem with a service most airlines don't even have? amazing) Well tonight absolutely put me over the moon.

I have a lot of people counting on me for some work tomorrow morning at 7am. I booked a very late direct flight, 9:35pm to 11:54pm. I was very worried when at 9:05, when we should have been boarding, they announced that all westbound flights from Boston had been temporarily grounded due to weather over the midwest and they wouldn't even get another update for at least a half hour. So what does jetBlue do? Immediate change the flight plan to have us fly south (around the weather) and have us boarding less than 10 minutes late. The new route would have taken quite a bit longer by taking us well out of the way, but just like they planned, when the hold was released at 11pm we were able to turn sooner and not go as far south, while any other airline would still be sitting on the ground in Boston. We arrived only 25 minutes late. This is the most amazing above and beyond effort to get me to my destination I've ever seen from an airline. Wow.

P.S. Third cab I've taken in the last week and all of them have had their check engine light on, what gives?

My least on my apartment in Atlanta was up, and that was not somewhere I wanted to sign another one so I had to move out. Since I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do next, I'm not sure where I'm going to end up living. In the meantime, most of my stuff got put in storage and I'm heading home to Boston for a little while. Although the drive can be done in 2 days, I'm taking a week and making some stops.

Tuesday I packed up my car and left Atlanta. Well, first it didn't fit and I had to unpack the car, repack boxes, drive more stuff to storage, and then repack the car. But then, only 4 hours later than I wanted, I was on my way... until I ran out of gas. But then 1 hour later I was at it again. I spent the night with an Aunt and Uncle in Norfolk, VA.

Wednesday I drove to DC. There I saw Operation Spy at the Spy Museum. It's basically this interactive experience where you take on the role of a CIA agent in a foreign country trying to recover a stolen nuclear device. You control surveillance cameras, unscramble phone calls, sneak into a secure facility by disabling cameras and locks, search an office, crack a safe, and interrogate a suspect. It was awesome. I highly recommend it if you're in the area, but it is better if you go with a group of people you know (about 4). I saw my cousin Rachel and then had dinner with queiss, bluekirby, and kizzatz.

Thursday I drove to Philly where I had an interview. Then I went to Atlantic City to see how the fountain was doing. Now I'm in New York for the weekend.

I've procrastinated writing this for a week but I guess that is long enough. For anyone who doesn't know, I spent most of last month in London. I would have written more from there but I had webserver issuez (which should be fixed for good now), so let me summarize the trip. I was there to work on a project, it was pretty crazy, I saw a lot of London, the tube is cool, made friend with and hung out with some locals, went on a crazy road trip to Scotland and all over England, my bag got lost... Ok, maybe a little more detail than that.

( too much detail for the front page )

All of my pictures

This is a story about something that happened back in May, a interesting string of coincidences. At the time I was on a business trip in LA, doing a playtest for an upcoming project with PlayMotion, when we received an email from a summer intern back in our Atlanta office with a link to an interesting YouTube video. It was of people playing a breakout-style videogame in a movie theater by leaning left and right to control the paddle. My portfolio will tell you that I'd done something like that as early as 2001, probably the basis for this project, although the person who sent me the email didn't know that, he just thought it was cool and similar to what we do.

( More coincidences abound, read on )

In 2003 I created an online and multiplayer version of the card game Set, so that I could practice and play with people at a distance. It was one of my more successful projects and although I didn't actively advertise it many people seemed to find and enjoy it. Last September I was threatened by Set Enterprises to cease and desist infringing their trademark and copyrights. Of course I knew I had been intentionally doing this I didn't feel like I had much of a leg to stand on and took the page down. Almost a year later, I'm still receiving emails from people who enjoyed my game, who want it back, who want my program to run their own servers.

( Ben's ethical diatribe )

The question I have is, what can I do now? I'm afraid of putting the game back up or distributing the server for someone else to serve, but I want people to be able to play it. The Set Enterprises website is unbearably crappy and hasn't changed at all. I offered to give them my version for free to let them provide it under whatever terms they liked (for pay if they needed, though it should be profitable with ad support alone, I thin) and I didn't even get a reply. A simple search or the Wikipedia page will give you a list of many other sites about or containing Set. Many have playable versions as Flash or Java applets (although not many have true multiplayer capability). How is it that they can continue to operate? If anyone has a suggestion for me, I'd really like to know what people think.

Parkour is a physical art or sport the goal of which is to move as quickly and efficiently as possibly, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is often seen in the media as some pretty fancy urban acrobatics. It makes for great youtube videos which is how I was first interested in it. My recently renewed interest in running and general desire to get more in shape made me think it would be something fun to learn.

After reading more about it today, I thought that the philosophy is perfect for me. Anyone who has seen me running around everywhere should understand. And seriously, why go around when you can go over? I don't know if what it takes, the agility and strength, or the ability to develop it through hard work and practice, but I'm excited to try, more than I have been about any other excercise routine that was solely for the purpose of getting in shape. So I've found some locals who I think can help me.

I've had some frequently recurring dreams for a while now where I can fly. It's not like Superman or anything, mostly just 2-3 feet off the ground and only with intense concentration and training. I don't even remember the dreams in morning as dreams, but often I have memories of being able to do it that I know aren't real. It sort of feels like what it was like to hover in the vertical wind tunnel, which may have something to with the phantom memories. I imagine that the freedom of movement that is said to come with parkour to be the next best thing.

I haven't talked about what's been going on lately. Since my apartment was broken into and things have been getting stressful at work, I've been a bit of a mess. Something else I haven't talked much about is my girlfriend, Katie. I've been seeing her for about 4 months now. Things were good, athough this week was tough since the stress I've been under, and some of hers, has effected our relationship a bit. Yesterday, however, was a great day, enough to make me want to say something about it.

( If you read on, there's an explosion in this story )

I have finally replaced my stolen wii. My new friend code is:

8623 0016 9305 2872

If you're going to enter it into your Wii, please comment with your friend code since they need to be mutual.

Yesterday while I was at work my apartment was burglarized. I got home to find my door closed, but the door frame was split in half so that nothing was really holding it that way. They didn't get all the expensive things in the place, but they sure got some good stuff. Luckily not my PC will all my data, but they did take: my laptop, my camcorder, my digital camera, my projector, my Wii, all of my Wii games and GameCube games (for playing on the Wii) as well as half of my PlayStation2 games (accidentally?) and pretty much all the accessories for all those things. Oh yeah, so if already used my Wii friend code, go ahead and send them some nasty message.

Luckily I have renters insurance, if you don't have insurance, let this serve as a warning get yourself some damn renters insurance. Nothing taken was really that irreplacable and some of the things I'll even be happy to have to replace. Still, what isn't replacable is feeling secure in this apartment. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet. At the very least I can trasfer to an identical apartment not on the ground floor, although this place has had break-ins on every floor. I can buy myself an alarm system, too. What I really want is a standard metal door frame, not one made out of one by, a safer neighborhood, and a complex that cares about the security of the front door/gate. I might be able to replace a door frame here at my own expense but I'm considering moving to a place that already has all 3 of those things.

I don't know why they picked my place. I keep the shades down for exactly this reason, so that no one can see in and see all my awesome stuff. The night before, while I was watching the superbowl on my projector, I ordered a pizza and the delivery guy commented that I had the perfect setup for a superbowl party, so I can't help wondering if that had anything to do will everything disappearing the following day. Why do people have to suck?

Reading the summary of the MacWorld keynote today reminded of why I hate Apple. There's no question they have the best designers and they produce some seriously polished, usable products. But the reason I don't like the company and don't want to own any of their products is that they are bad people and they encourage the same of their users. The keynote was blatently elitist, which is what I have come to expect from Mac users recently. I'm all for hyping your product (or the one you enjoy) and touting its superiority over the competition but I think it is quite a different matter to be overly condescending without reason. I don't try to tell anyone that they shouldn't use a Mac or an iPod; I think they are wonderful devices, the best for those who they are especially good for. So why do they need to be rude to anyone using a product that is not made by Apple? Apple, as particularly evidenced by its recent "Mac vs. PC" ads (which I find offensive), has given its users a liscence to denigrate any competing product. They don't accept that different devices have different strengths and weaknesses that make them desirable for different people. Anything that isn't the thing they like is immediately evil, even if the thing they don't like about it is an unfortunate result of being better in some other way that I desire, just as to me the lack of that feature is an unfortunate result of the more streamlined design of the Apple product. Until Apple and its fanboys adopt a better social policy I can't, in good concience, join them.