Why it's been so long since my last message:

Ok, I hit a bit of writer's block. I had a bunch of notes, and I kept accumulating notes, but I just couldn't make myself sit down and write everything up nice and neat. And then, Zhang Ming and I went shopping.

We turned down the street that leads to the software bazaar and I looked at the street sign. I knew all the characters, but I couldn't make sense of the word. "Wen2" looks like a broad-shouldered stick figure, and means character, literary, or writing. "Ming2", which is the moon and sun next to each other, means bright, and combined with "bai2", white, means understand.

"What's wen2ming2," I asked.

"Civilization. This is Civilization Street."

Later, in the software bazaar, he pointed to a name on a chalkboard.

"Wen2Ming2san1. Do you know this?"

"Ahh. I should. It's - it's the name of the street. San1 means 'three.' It's an address."

"No. It's the game."

That's right. We found what we were looking for. Civilization III. Civilization, "Civ" to those of us with the affliction, cost me the month of February, 1992, pretty much in its entirety, and was partially responsible for my C in Freshman Physics (my attitude was the rest of that). Civ II got caught up in a legal battle between various publishers, and so we have Civ: Call To Power (never played it); Civ II; and SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri), which was pretty good. Despite flirting with a SMAC habit a few years ago, I've generally not been interested in computer games. Every three or four months I cave in to marketing, buy something, and within a day am bored and uninterested. But Civ III, Civ III was different. Maybe I never really got clean of Civ and SMAC, but I've been stuck on Civ III like the South Park kids on the Okama GameSphere ("dude, it's still only Saturday. We can still play for thirty-six hours before we have to go to school.")

So that's why this mail is late.

It's developing into a very nice sunny day. I've parted all the curtains in the little side-rooms in my apartment, and with the sun coming in they are very cozy. This could deceive one into thinking that it's warm outside. In fact, it's so cold that an unprotected person would get hypothermia in minutes and die in under an hour. That temperature, for readers without Survival Guides by your computers, is about 60F in the shade.

I woke up early this morning for the Tai Chi lesson (early as in actually early, like 6:40 am) and, while waiting, noticed blue sky and so ran up to the roof to check out the sunrise. You would need a camera for this one - suffice it to say, it was so impressive that I'm honestly considering waking up early enough to run over to Yao Mountain and climb it in time to see the sunrise. Fortunately, this plan will only become easier as I delay implementation, at least until Dec 21.

Tai Chi class is a mixed bag. As an anal-retentive recovering Project Manager, I'm very antsy about time. If a lesson is scheduled from 9:00 until 11:00, I expect to be out of there by 11:05. If this doesn't happen I get antsy. Even if I like the lesson. Even if I'm paying a fixed price, and thus getting 'free' time. Even if I have nothing else to do all day. By ten minutes past the hour, I'm downright seething. Li Sifu (Master Li) frequently keeps going until noon.

Part of the problem is that, when Li Xu comes, Master Li explains stuff to him. You might think that this is good, and it is, but Li Xu only translates a small fraction of this wisdom to us. So we practice for a few minutes, and then they converse for ten or twenty minutes. (Oh, and some advice to anyone who translates: Don't ever say, "I'll tell you later." You never will. You might as well say, "I'm not going to tell you." Translate it right now, or give the gist, or don't pretend to be translating.) We started the tactic of practicing in the background, until class resumes. But even better, Li Xu couldn't come to class this week. This was a problem in that we had to use my apartment, which doesn't have any rooms big enough for three or four people. But we made room, using "xiao tai chi," small Tai Chi, a word and style I invented. And last night, I removed all the furniture from the room I use least and swept the floor, and now I have a bona fide empty room for practice. An unexpected side benefit of working with Master Li without a translator (and note, please that his halting English is still better than our Chinese) is that we have to figure out for ourselves more of what he's saying, so we probably learn and remember better than if Li Xu simply said, "Do this for practice and do this when performing."

We've learned about twenty steps of the 83-step Chen style. Master Li wanted to go up to five lessons a week so we could finish before Julie has to leave, but I hope our much-improved lessons this week have convinced him that all we need is better concentration and Li Xu-less classes.

My 2c on the Harry Potter movie:

Hermione isn't how I pictured her. Ron is dead on; I didn't really have a mental picture of Harry; Hagrid is outright wrong. Hagrid needs veins in his forehead. A better Hagrid would have been that guy who was Kevin Costner's catcher, Gus, in For Love of the Game; he was also in Magnolia as the cop who loses his gun. (I'm basing these judgments on the Vanity Fair Oct 2001 spread, which I found at Rosemary's Cafe last week).

The dialog boxes all suck: in addition to showing two choices, they also have a yes/no. So you always have to click twice - 1) I want to break the treaty, 2) OK. Most of these things are trivial and there's no reason to have redundancy, no reason to require two clicks. So that makes you zoom through, not read carefully, and then screw up the big things. No, wait, I didn't mind to launch missiles. There really, really, should be an undo.

Much of the program requires double-clicking. Double-clicking is stupid. It's barely justified in file managers, where you might want to click once to select or twice to open (separate issue - file managers shouldn't exist). But for a list of choices, there's simply no reason at all to require double-clicking. One click is sufficient to allow a full range of expression. But some parts of the interface require one click, others two, with no real reason. And the UI is just slightly sluggish sometimes, maybe 100 or 200 milliseconds, so you're not sure if the first click did anything and so you click again but the second click goes somewhere else, and suddenly you've traded your supply of horses, which you needed to make more cavalry, for a box of number two pencils and the exciting new technology of Underwater Basket Weaving.

My complaints about Civ III:

A big beef I've had since Civ I: loss of control. You move some troops around, click "end of turn", and then the screen starts jumping around city to city and things move and sometimes you are asked questions or shown troops and when you answer things start jumping around again. This can last a full minute or two per turn. You can't pause. You can't go back. You just sit there, dazed and confused. "Your city is revolting. send in the jack-booted thugs?" You hit yes, then think, no, wait, was that the city with the nukes? Too late - you're whisked off to another location. By the time you have control back, you're forgotten which city it was and what you were going to do about it.

This is super-annoying when combined with big maps. You have to sit and watch a bunch of random troops shuffle all over the board, for a minute or longer, with no way to interrupt. So the rhythm is 'play for one minute, then wait for one minute.' To compensate I've been playing on smaller maps with less opponents, but that's also less fun.

Instead, all of the automated stuff should happen first, and it should be possible to hide it, and then you should get a "daily briefing," a list of issues that you need to deal with, but you can choose what to look at, in what order. "Today's briefing: Moscow finished building those tanks you ordered and needs to know what to build next - gulags or dachas; the French are invading again; and we discovered the Beet, which enables us to reseach either Gunpowder or Borsht."

Something I learned as a UI designer is "Fitts' Law." Loosely stated, it says that itty-bitty buttons on the far corner of the screen are hard to nail on the first try. (It actually describes a mathematical relationship between target size, target distance, and accuracy for eye-hand movements). A non-intuitive side-effect, by the way, is that buttons in corners and on the sides of the screen are easier to hit. This is because, as long as that outer pixel counts as part of the button, you can overshoot by inches and still hit, because you're bounded by the edge of the screen. The Macintosh menu is at the very top of the screen; the Windows menu is not, and tests do indeed show that the Macintosh menu is up to twice as fast as the Windows menu.

Apparently nobody at Firaxis learned any of this, though I don't remember SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, their last game) being nearly so bad. But Civ III is laden with itty-bitty buttons in weird places, near but not actually on the edges of the screen. If there is a yes and a no button on a dialog, you have to put the cursor literally right on top of the button to activate it. One pixel off and you get zilch, even though there's nothing but background and it really wouldn't hurt anything to have a generous target area,

What makes this extra-frustrating is that some of the UI is spectacular. I don't mean pretty, though it is. I mean that it shows a lot of information clearly in a small area. The main city page is incredibly dense, and mostly works well. Except that it doesn't have a button to get to the Governer page. I had to dig through the manual repeatedly to learn that, if you hit "G", you go to a page that lets you automate your city management. This is incredibly useful - why isn't there a button? Oh, and the Governer page is wretchedly unpleasant to use - it looks like some intern glued quasi-nice graphics on top of a standard toolkit dialog box a week before ship. I could design a better interface in three seconds.

And the diplomacy screen? A nightmare. It took me many tries to learn that Peace is the default, and that I don't have to negotiate a Peace Treaty with new neighbors. I'm still not entirely sure how to break a Peace Treaty. I had a problem for a while where I had foolishly agreed to trade most of my Iron supply to the Romans (who by the way snuck in and grabbed some of my land that later turned out to have the only accessible saltpeter deposits - that sucked until I built a city next door with a library and overwhelmed them with culture, at which point that city rebelled and I had access to saltpeter.), and couldn't figure out how to cancel the trade. Ugh - ug-lee. I would love to hear the internal stories about how the development process happened and how the interface is such a blend of quality and dreck.

Enough writing. Time to play some more. Or maybe eat lunch or go outside and enjoy the sunshine. Or prepare next week's lecture in case we got to Longji this weekend. Or start grading the 100 midterms. Nah, time to play some more.