Bad at maths, good at customer service? Work for Microsoft!

I have recently returned to university and I am meant to use Microsoft Visio Standard 2013 for a number of of my university assignments. We have the 'option' of using it on the computers at uni, as the software is prohibitively expensive. While looking online to see how prohibitive the pricing was I came across this:

$300 doesn't seem so unreasonable to me, not that I have $300 that I could spend on anything right now. I clicked 'Buy now' with the intention of getting as much information on it as I could, and found myself presented with this:

When I called the Microsoft Store and asked what additional features warranted the 83% price difference (based on the exchange rate at the time of writing), I was told that AU$539 was US$299 due to the current exchange rate. When I informed the diligent little Microsoft monkey that he was operating on bad information, and that AU$539 was actually closer to US$560, he apologised for not being able to explain the discrepancy and then offered me some actually useful advice. He suggested that I find a way to set up a US mailing address and then order the product, and as long as the process didn't cost me US$260 or more I would be getting a discount.

This 83% koalas on keyboards tax isn't unique to the Microsoft Store. Check out the price differences over at Adobe, the Apple Store, all computer game distributors and just about anyone else who distributes software. The problem is a long standing issue, and something that I have griped about for decades. In my formative years I would often read US computer game magazines, and was shocked by the price listings for games. That was Twenty years ago, and our dollar is a mightier thing than it once was (thank you Paul). In particular I thought that perhaps things would start to change in the wake of digital distribution, but in reality there are very few digital distribution services that do direct (or nearly direct) exchange rate conversions (Steam is the only one that comes to mind). The vast majority are happy to price us like it's 1984.

Anyway. Thank you Microsoft. Thank you for hiring people who actually want to help your koalstomers, even when you don't.

On the temporal horizon

It is that time of year agin.  Doctor Who is a moment away, and by 'moment' I actually mean countable days.  Our heroes will be gracing our screens on March 31.  I won't laden you with any of the spoilers that have come my way, but I will direct you to the minisode that acts as a lead in to the up coming episodes.

I should also mention that this is a special year for the show.  "Why?", I here you ask. "Tell us, oh glorious knower of things. What is it that separates this year from the rest?"  Is it that there will be yet another classic villain appearing this season?  Seeing that there has been at least one (sometimes two) villain(s) from the classic series reintroduced in all but one season of the revived series, that doesn't seem like it would be that special.  Is it that this year's Christmas special will be the 800th episode?  True, but no.  Is it that the fourth episode in* this block will be the 100th episode of the revived series?  Also true, but also no.  It is in fact because this year we mark the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who.  On 23rd November, 1963 William Hartnell appeared as The Doctor for the very first time, and with the astounding powers of mathematics we can mathematise that it will have been fifty calendar years on 23rd November, 2013, give or take nothing (because I'm that good).

While we are looking at score cards I would like to point out that with eight episodes left in series 7 and two specials airing later in the year Matt Smith will move up two spots into second place for appearances in the most televised stories, and up one into seventh for appearances in the most televised episodes.  Here are the current leader boards.

Televised Stories				Televised Episodes
Tom Baker	4th	41		Tom Baker	4th	172
David Tennant	10th	36		William Hartnell	1st	134
William Hartnell	1st	29		Jon Pertwee	3rd	128
Matt Smith	11th	29		Patrick Troughton	2nd	119
Jon Pertwee	3rd	24		Peter Davison	5th	69
Patrick Troughton	2nd	21		David Tennant	10th	47
Peter Davison	5th	20		Sylvestor McCoy	7th	42
Sylvestor McCoy	7th	12		Matt Smith	11th	34
Christopher Eccleston	9th	10		Colin Baker	6th	31
Colin Baker	6th	8		Christopher Eccleston	9th	13
Paul McGann	8th	1		Paul McGann	8th	1

50 years of time and space

I should also point out that the BBC will be actually celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who.  I will also be celebrating it, but I won't be producing two TV films to air later this year.  An Adventure in Time and Space will be about the inception and early production of the series, while the other, as yet unnamed, TV film will be a feature length adventure starring the current cast.  I will probably just make a cake.

An Adventure in Time and Space will be written by former Doctor Who villain, Mark Gatis, whose writing credits include Sherlock, The League of Gentlemen and of course Doctor Who, and the Doctor's 50th anniversary adventure will be penned by the current show runner of both Sherlock and Doctor Who, Steven Moffat.

And the future?

Matt Smith has also signed up for at least one more tour as the Doctor, with filming of series 8 to start later this year, and is likely to include the shows 250th televised story.

If you you are interested in the later Doctors from the classic series Big Finish Audio has three ongoing audio play series.  Doctor Who (starring the 5th, 6th and 7th incarnations), The Eighth Doctor Adventures and The Fourth Doctor Adventures.  All of these series see the original actors reprising their  role as the Doctor.

Edit: I stated above that the 100th episode of the revived series was going to be 'the fourth episode in this block' (Series 7, episode 9), which would have made it "Hide". I botched my maths, and it is actually "Crimson Horror", which is the sixth episode of this block (Series 7, Episode 11).

For 10 points:
During their long and tumultuous relationship, the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey has:
a) executed him
b) exiled him
c) elected him president
d) all of the above

For 20 points:
What are the the first and last purely historical episodes in which the only fantasy elements were the presence of the Doctor, his companions and the TARDIS?

For 50 points:
From what we have seen in Doctor Who what is the most obvious distinction between those characters who appear to have some control over their appearance during regeneration and those that appear to have none?

For 100 points:
The first series of the revived Doctor Who carried on a tradition of fulfilling two criteria for regular season stories that contain one of the classic series' monsters.  What are the monsters?  What are the two criteria?

Proteus

Proteus is a game that is only an aesthetic and a mechanic, and as such the goal of playing it is in the playing itself, rather than any achievable sense of completion.  It is the kind of game you play until you are done playing.

The style takes 8-bit (or even earlier) 2D video and audio assets and uses them to populate a world in 3D and high fidelity.  The pixels are large and crisp and the sounds are a generation above PC speaker played on new sound cards.  This throws back to a time when sounds and pixel lumps didn't mean anything until you interacted with them in context, then we would recognise them anywhere.

The mechanic is simple: You walk and you look and the world notices that you are there, and in just being there you play the island like a musical instrument.  This seemingly limited interaction ('just being there'), like in the real non-super-pixel 'nature' (aka 'The Environment', aka where snakes live), is enough to get a kick out of your surroundings.  And just like in that same real non-super-pixel 'nature', 'just being there' is also enough to harass the local wildlife.  Except the owls.  They don't seem to care.  It could be described as an interactive ambient sound generator presented through a game engine.  Actually, that is exactly what it is.

Is the game meant to be simultaneously reminding us of our impact on the natural world as it reminds us of a time in the medium when context was everything?  I don't know, but I can tell you that Proteus is an anagram for 'pot user'.

Antichamber

As a boy I played The Legend of Zelda, in which appears The Lost Woods.  A forested area that repeats unless a specific path is taken, effectively trapping our hero in a non-euclidian nightmare.  What followed for my young mind were actual non-euclidian nightmares in which sections of what I perceived to be the real world repeated (often infinitely), making it impossible for me to escape disorientation.  I lost sleep, and my psychological state deteriorated.  In this state of increased fragility a wrong turn into unfamiliar territory could induce extreme anxiety. I became obsessed with maps and avoided streets that did not run parallel as often as possible.  I traded the game away, but the dreams never stopped.

It is 2013.  More than two decades have passed since the cartridge left my possession, and in that time I have played a number of games that have toyed with unmappable areas, and changing space, but there is something so base about what happened in those woods.  My dreams had grown worse, and these games couldn't keep up.  The real-world had been stripped back and my repetition was now hued in one shade each of pink and blue that consumed the black as they built themselves into the infinite.  No shadows.  No detail.  No texture.

When I first saw a video for Antichamber, I recognised something.  Something that held greater familiarity to me.  It was the very core of those dreams.  When they were at their darkest.  A world stripped back to the only things I would ever need to be afraid.  Everything styled as close to nothing as it could ever be.  If Escher had made horror movies they would've looked like this.

The game itself feeds you the pavlovian crumbs of small victories to keeping you moving, but the process repeats and a whole new level of cyclical gameplay is revealed.  At every point you are taunted with hints to solutions that you have just found, all delivered in the smug tone of a fortune cookie. It even has the gaul to give you map.

Antichamber is consistent in everything that it does, from the moment you launch the game to the moment that you quit.  It is the perfect nightmare.

I highly recommend it.

Means? Justified!

Anyone who has been, has had or has known of a teenage boy anytime in the last two decades can attest to the life consuming talents of videogames.  Somewhere along the line of one of the aforementioned was some kind of educator, or perhaps just a doe-eyed idealist who believed that there was some positive lesson to be taken from the beast and reapplied to a productive purpose and educational videogames were born.

For decades edutainment in all of its forms has generally been regarded as a fool's errand.  The kind of thing that committees push at board meetings six months before their entire department/company is looking for new jobs as they watch whatever isn't nailed down get sold off to pay each hand that is owed.

It could be argued that there have been some few success stories in the past, like the Carmen Sandiego  games that sometimes came packed with single volume encyclopaedias, but for the most part any educational content in a game that could be be deemed even remotely entertaining was purely incidental.

Then there was Duolingo.

Duolingo launched just over a year ago, and comes at it from a different tack.  Instead of starting from a desire to entertain, it starts with those core game mechanics that not so subtly engage our pavlovian responses.  The very same ones that have been employed to encourage us to drop coin to reach the next level or earn extra skills in World of Warcraft or Farmville.  Except Duolingo has a far more insidious agenda.  Polyglotism.  Yeah!  I'm not kidding.  They actually want you to learn and use languages other than English.  In the real world!

Whatever you do, do not go to duolingo.com and sign up to learn French, Spanish, German and/or Portuguese for FREE in an addictive format that will leave you conjugating verbs in your kitchen, on the bus  and in front of your children/parents.  You'll tell a friend and they'll tell a friend.  Lovers will meet up in darkened hotel rooms to master German nounal genders while the muted tv flickers in the corner washing their multilingual debauchery in a pallid light.   This is a disease.  This is a danger to all people.  Languages other than English could become an epidemic.  Imagine the havoc that would be wrought if this kind of thing were to spread. This is the nightmare.  The one they spoke about.

Duolingo is crack for people who like to travel.




For 10 points: An english word that pluralises by inserting the 's' into the word instead of at the end.