Kyle Smith

Stacy and I ordered Wii Fit from Amazon when it first became available for pre-order back in April and it was finally delivered on Wednesday. We’ve been using it consistently for the last three days and while it’s got some fun activities that definitely get me exercising, on the whole I’m not all that happy with it.

I find that Wii Fit suffers from the same problems as Wii Sports: too many things to acknowledge, poor feedback when trying to learn activities, there isn’t a “play” mode, and the activities are actually fairly short. I’ll explain each in a little more depth.

First off, is anyone else as sick as I am of having to hit the A button all the time to acknowledge pithy little comments from the game or its characters? I want to play the game, not respond to dialog. I find this happening in too many Nintendo-produced titles (Paper Mario, Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii). I’d really like a “quickplay” mode where it lets me jump right into playing instead of having to specify a lot of options or respond to prompts.

As for feedback, the sports titles are pretty unforgiving when it comes to executing an activity. I got extremely frustrated with some of the tennis and boxing training in Wii Sports. I knew I was doing it wrong, but the game didn’t give any hints as to how I could improve my skills and in the case of tennis, once you miss one ball, it’s over and you need to start from the beginning.

The next gripe is related to the last; many times I really don’t care how well I do on an activity or game, I just want something to help me unwind and play around. The Nintendo titles are too structured, in my opinion. You can’t just head soccer balls endlessly, keep skiing for twenty minutes, or just keep belting out home runs. How many of you prefer unstructured play to rule-driven activities?

My final complaint was the shortness of the sports activities; it’s related to the previous point, but even if I were trying to get a proper workout I find myself spending just as much time navigating through menus and dialogs just as much as I am performing the activities. I get that Wii Fit tries to ease you into exercising and gives you more reps or time when you’ve mastered the basics, but sometimes I just want to keep doing something until I perfect it, instead of having to start anew each time.

The people that talk to me on a regular basis know that I liked to read in cycles. Around the beginning of the year I was focused on Isaac Asimov. More recently I’ve returned to my people/project management kick and went through a dozen or so books from the IBM site library. Of the dozen, there were a few that were particularly noteworthy that I’ve added to my list to recommend to people. The list:

• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• The Deadline: A Novel by Tom DeMarco
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman
• The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks

(Sorry, cleaning out the queue.)

This morning the first article in a series on IBM Director that my coworker Jay and I are writing was published on developerWorks.  You can read it here.

Several weeks ago I volunteered to be a mentor for an area middle school student as part of an outreach program IBM has.  The program involves communicating with the student via an online discussion forum and completing small activities together.  The most recent activity that we tackled was a free-writing assignment where we each answered four questions.  Since I spent some time thinking about them in order to give serious answers to my mentee, I thought I’d post them over the course of a few days as a challenge to all of you.

Today’s question is: if you could have three wishes, what would they be?

(No, you cannot wish for additional wishes.)

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been trying to get better organized. I’ve been using a simple steno pad from Staples with a page for each week or so to keep track of my action items, with all of my “next action” items for the day/week at the top of the page and any calls or emails I need to make growing upwards from the bottom. For the most part the system works works. Hard things go on my calendars, soft things on my list.

The one area I haven’t really tamed is project ideas and future items (basically my tickler file to use David Allen’s terminology). The only solution I’ve come up with that might work would be a binder that I could add pages to on an as-needed basis. The downside of such a solution is that it’s yet another thing I’ll forget to bring with me (along with my iPod, digital camera, and digital recorder), so I would really like to have something on my laptop to keep track of this. An electronic solution would also make it easier to search and add rich content to.
My requirements are as follows:

• Must be secure (accessible only by me, data would ideally be encrypted)
• Must not be publicly-accessible (may contain IBM confidential information)
• Must be lightweight (doesn’t require Notes or a continually-running service on my laptop)
• Easily searchable (I <3 live search) or have a flexible tagging system
• Would ideally allow attachments or embedded objects (images primarily)
• Must support rich text formatting
• Dependency tracking would be cool
• Related to dependency tracking — a reminder or “can’t start until X” feature would also be nice

Anybody know of a piece of software that meets some or all of those requirements?

Rouslan, I don’t really post anymore because most everyone that reads planet that I actually give a damn about I already talk to or see on a weekly basis. Also, many of us either can’t or don’t like to talk about work, and since work and sleeping account for 75% of my (and most peoples’) day, that doesn’t leave a whole lot to discuss in a public forum.

I have all sorts of projects and ideas, if you really want to hear them, Sametime me or come by my office and I’ll talk your ear off.

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Had a nice little 4-day break from work this past weekend. Friday was spent doing laundry and cleaning up my apartment. Saturday was a pretty lazy day — just hung out with Stacy all day and generally enjoyed not having to do anything. Sunday my parents came down from VT to drop off a Hoosier cabinet and have lunch with us. Spent the afternoon lounging around before driving to Red Hook to see The Family Stone, which was okay. The final day of my vacation was spent in Kingston searching for end tables and a wine rack that would fit in the bottom of the Hoosier cabinet so I don’t have to take up counter space with bottles. I came up empty handed. :-/

Woke up this morning and was greeted by 3″ of snow covering everything with more coming down. Thankfully the roads were fairly clear and the gym was relatively dead (as is work) so I got to have a nice quiet morning.

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A few pictures from the Vanderbilt estate this evening as the sun was setting. Ended up going to Rhinebeck to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, which was pretty frickin’ funny, given the subject matter. Definitely recommend going to see it. Useless trivia: turns out the director was born only 50 miles from my home in Vermont. Also finished reading Fight Club today. Always interesting to see how screenwriters morph the story from the original.

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If you happen to know where my original copies of Hero or Jin-Roh are, please let me know.

That is all.

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Note: The following has been sitting as a draft for several days now. Since it’s unlikely I’ll bother to go back and finish what I was thinking, I’ve decided to just post it as is.

I’ve been joking with people for several years now that in ten years I’ll be no where near the field of computer science, but rather in the last field I would ever expect to be in. The field that always popped into my mind was writing, because I typically don’t enjoy it when boundaries are imposed on me (hence the reason I hate writing papers for classes). I definitely don’t enjoy computer science as much as I used to. For the most part the rate of learning CS material has slowed considerably from when I first got interested in it. Most of the classes I’ve taken here at Clarkson have been a waste of my time. Rather than waste away in class for fifteen weeks I could have obtained the same knowledge simply by picking up the appropriate book and saved myself a lot of time and money.

Occasionally I wonder if I’m not really joking. I certainly don’t enjoy straight computer programming. There needs to be more freedom in it for me to get interested, the ability to do what I want. That’s probably why I’ve always enjoyed the first month or two of any IBM project I’ve worked on, because that’s typically the point where I need to get up to speed on a new topic quickly and then design the solution. But how many jobs are really like that? How many employers let you wander off for 3 months as long as you promise to throw a nicely bundled solution into their laps upon returning?

The other joke I usually tell to people is that it would be nice to just open my own business. Unfortunately, I have so many ideas it’s difficult to narrow it down — a cozy bookstore / coffee shop, a tavern or pub (not a bar), or a homey movie theater (with an old-style marquee). Perhaps I could start with one and gradually add the others. None of those sound like cash cows, so making a living would always be difficult, but perhaps I’m actually okay with that.

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