Mobile phone is now my video game platform of choice

I remember being glued to the television screen while barely surviving in most of the role playing video games I played when I was young. It didn’t matter that most of them were in Japanese, because I would still slog through the dialogue and snatch whatever I could understand. Ahh, those were the days…

As I grew up, I still played video games, but less often. I’ve always preferred to play on console machines rather than the computer. For some reason, game playing felt right on consoles. But game playing on consoles required switching on the television, switching on the console machine… yeah, I’m getting lazy, and selective about my games (you know, not enough time)… It just feels like a bit of an effort.

Then I started to use the computer more often, as a result of my university work and programming. Since the computer was already on, the notion of playing games on the computer started to be more appealing. But I only really play The Sims. Using the keyboard and mouse to play action games felt awkward for me, but the point-and-click-with-no-rush system of The Sims was ok.

But even that sort of died… the loading time was terrible, I had to save… starting up and ending the game still felt like effort…

Then I bought my iPhone.

Now, I own a handheld console (a DS since you asked), though I don’t play very often. The games aren’t “motivating” me enough. Plus the screen is small, and I still have to start it up to play games.

My iPhone, on the other hand, is different. I keep it switched on when I’m awake. That means, if I want to play a game, I just need to load up the game, which is fairly fast. I’m not isolating the iPhone here. Any mobile phone with gaming capabilities fit into the criteria (but I’m kinda invested with the Apple product… not a fanatic, but just reluctant to change phones in general. You know, I’m just obeying Newton’s first law).

When I want to play a game on my phone, I just start the game up. I don’t have to switch on the phone because it’s already switched on. The start up and closing times are (usually) fast. The games don’t need saving, or saves fast, or saves in a way you don’t notice (like on closing). My only concerns are the small screen, and whether I like the game.

I’m saying all this because applications are about the user. I’ve been looking at the top games from the Apple App Store. They seem to be the type of game where it’s easy to learn, easy to start up, easy to let go. Perfect for the attention-deficit and finicky modern mobile phone user. Compare this to the in-depth role playing games I’ve played in the past, burning through hours of playtime just to gain enough levels so I could at least survive the beginning attacks of the boss fight.

Times have changed…

The Psychotic Line – 3rd dimension of the Real Line

We have the Real Line, from negative infinity on one end to positive infinity on the other. Then we have the Imaginary Line, where we rotate numbers on the Real Line around to obtain imaginary numbers (or complex numbers). So what’s the natural logical progression?

Meet the Psychotic Line, with delusional numbers. As expected, special cases of delusional numbers collapse to either a complex number or real number, by simply setting the delusional component to zero.

The delusional part, j, shall be defined as
j^2 = -i
where i is the unit pure imaginary number.

Thus, j^4 = (-i)^2 = (-1)^2 * i^2 = -1

A typical delusional number is written as
d = a + bi + cj
(d stands for delusional, how coincidentally fortunate!)

Where complex numbers require rotation of 360 degrees to span the full complex plane, delusional numbers only require 180 degrees. Simply study spherical coordinates to understand why (part of the effort is already done by rotation from complex numbers). Once one can leap from the real world to the imaginary world, it takes half the energy to jump to the psychotic world.

One should study the psychotic line, delusional numbers and their properties, for they (possibly) hold the secret to untapped human cerebral abilities, interstellar travel, and maybe even a longer answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. I wish you luck.

PS: This was written in jest. You’re supposed to laugh.

Comparisons using the eyeball check

Back when I first started working, one of my duties every month was to check reports. Yes, I know it says “Systems Analyst” on my job title then. Thank you for pointing that out. Don’t new staff often take on all sorts of miscellaneous duties like that?

As I was saying, I was to check reports (some financial data was involved). The users would check them of course. We’re just checking them (the report generator program was written by us) before handing the reports to them. Basically, it’s to make sure the numbers tally for the sections that they’re meant to be the same.

Now the reports were PDFs. In order to save paper (and more importantly, not keep so much paper physically), I check them on the computer screen. My colleague taught me a simple trick. Use Alt-Tab.

Open the first report and maximise it on the screen. Open the second report and maximise it on the screen too. Then I Alt-Tab between the 2 reports, flipping rapidly to make sure the numbers were identical, then paging to the next on both report, and so on and so forth.

I’m not understanding the content of the page, I’m using visual recognition. As in that’s not really a zero that’s registering in my brain. More like a slightly vertically elongated circle. I’m not comparing words and numbers. I’m comparing pixels.

PDFs aren’t diff-able (at least not that I know of). And it turns out that comparing PDFs using the eyeball check is exceedingly simple (albeit manual and tedious) with the Alt-Tab trick. It’s like facial recognition. Humans are good at recognising faces. We haven’t gotten computers to do on par though…

P.S. In case you don’t know about Alt-Tab, on Windows (hi Mac user!), when you hold the Alt button and tap the Tab button, the window just before your current window pops up. So I open the first report, then open the second report. The first report is on the window just before the second report’s window. Alt-Tab once to bring the first report into focus, pushing the second report back. Repeated Alt-Tabbing simply cycles between the 2 most “current” of the windows, in our case, the 2 reports.