luckylefty

A friend wants to make a plane trip using miles from her Capitol One credit card. She doesn't have quite enough miles for the trip. Unfortunately, unlike airline-specific miles, Capitol One doesn't let you buy extra miles, or pay with a combination of miles and cash. However, they do allow you to transfer miles from one person to another. So if anyone has a Capitol One card and would be interested in selling some miles, I have a buyer for you.

You'd think that someone would have set up a web site where people who want to buy miles can find people who want to sell miles, but I haven't been able to find one; I can find "we want to buy your miles!" sites, but no "you can buy miles here" site.

So it turns out that when I told my Android "Sync contacts with my google account", this meant "sync existing google contacts on to my phone", but not "Sync contacts I enter onto my phone with my google account". So when my phone crashed, and managed to delete the contacts, I have lost all of them. If you'd like me to have your phone number, assume I don't, and email me, or post it here (comments screened)

and my friend siderea has written a very insightful post on the subject. Signal boosting.

I have an extra ticket to the BSO rehearsal tomorrow (Wednesday) night. Music by Kodaly, Dvorak, Mendelssohn. Anyone interested in joining me?

No charge, since the ticket will just go to waste otherwise.

I got a typical piece of spam today, telling me to buy some penny stock. The two unusual things about this spam are that it got past the gmail spam filters, and that the subject line, rather than being something like "Stock XYZ is going to go up this week!" was something like "SPAM Stock XYZ is going to go up this week!".

My theory is that gmail wants to let discussions of spam get through, while spam doesn't, and has figured out that the discussions of spam contain the word "Spam" much more often than the spam does. Worked well until now, but now the spammers have figured it out.

My Mac died, and will be in the shop for a week or so :-(. Does anyone have a computer I can borrow for a week or so? Ideally a laptop with wifi, but I can cope with a tower that I have to connect via ethernet.

I have 2 tickets to a preview of The Adjustment Bureau, a Matt Damon movie based on a Philip K. Dick Story, opening next month.

Preview is this Thursday at 4. If you're interested in joining me, let me know, and give me a phone number if I don't have it to work out details (comments screened).

One of the things that makes computer games addictive is the feeling of progress. As you play, you get better and better, and complete harder and harder challenges, and the positive reinforcement this gives you as get better keeps you coming back for more.

But to get this right, the difficulty level and learning curve have to be properly calibrated. If the puzzles are too hard, or the learning curve too steep, people won't be able to progress, and will get frustrated and quit. If the puzzles are too easy, there's no feeling of progress or accomplishment, so it just feels like mindless repetition, and people get bored and quit.

So you need something that in fact anyone who keeps playing can accomplish, but that feels like something that takes skill to accomplish.

My new idea for how to make this work is to cheat. If each level appears to be something that you play over and over again, being confronted with the same challenge each time, but it actually gets easier each time you try it, then it will seem as though you get better with practice and eventually solve it, but in fact anyone can solve it, because you don't need to get better; the puzzle gets easier.

The reason for the question mark in the title is that I have a suspicion that Angry Birds does exactly this. Just as I'm giving up on a puzzle, I seem to make progress that I can't explain. Maybe I've learned to hit the exact right angle to destroy the building. But maybe the laws of Angry-Bird-Physics change depending on the number of times I've played that particular level, and it's not that I've learned to hit "just the right angle", it's that as I play, a wider and wider range of angles are good enough to count as "just right".

This could be tested by switching between two copies of the game that are at the same level, one of which has been played more at that level than the other. If anyone is near the end of the first third of Angry Birds on a droid, and wants to test my theory that it cheats in this way, let me know.

If Angry Birds doesn't 'cheat' in this way, does anyone know of any other games that do? Or is this a new idea in game design? Hard to know for certain, since anyone using this technique would not publicize it; it depends for its effectiveness on the illusion that the player is getting better, when actually the game is getting easier, and the illusion would be ruined if people knew what was really happening.

So maybe I'm naive, but I had thought that when I clicked on "recent posts" on facebook I got, well, the recent posts of my friends. Apparently that's not true; I get those recent posts of friends that some mysterious facebook algorithm thinks are the ones I would like.

On LJ, if a friend posts something, I see it. And I have fine-grained control of who gets to see which of my posts. And I don't have the constant "we've changed the privacy policy, so things you thought were private are now public unless you go through a complex procedure to make them private again".

What's the advantage of facebook again? I use it occasionally, only for the reasons "it's where some of my friends post" and "it's where some of my friends will read my posts" (that is, if facebook deems my posts worthy of being shown to them. That is, I only use facebook because other people prefer it to LJ. But there must be some people who actually prefer facebook, and I can't figure out why.

At dinner last night, we discovered that three out of the six of us had, all for different reasons and at different times, read the Wikipedia Turnip Disambiguation Page. I don't know which is stranger; this fact, or the fact that we managed to discover it.