Archive for August, 2010
Rogue Trading
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Going Rogue, the new expansion to City of Heroes (My MMO-Crack of choice) went live yesterday.
At 20:30 yesterday UK time on the US servers, for the first time since CoV launched, the top two most populated servers were in “queue to get in” mode, and the rest were all saying “Under heavy load”. This is a good sign for a game I really quite like.
(If you’re interested in trying CoH, I can send out ten day trial codes. Drop me an email)
Claret everywhere
Saturday, August 14th, 2010Claret everywhere.
(By which I mean “ow, my toe is bleeding” and “Bother. I’ve spilt port and elderflower liquor all over the floor”. Which I know isn’t claret, but still).
This weekend I am doing nothing.
Well, I’m playing Dragon Age, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock 2 and City of Heroes. I’ve watched Lock, Stock & Two smoking barrels; Snatch and Rocknrolla; I’ve reduced the washing up pile to zero; Thrown the various fragments of The Book’s git repository around a bit so they stick to each other a bit better (and done some Actual Planning, if no Actual Writing); Got my dev environment for PiracyInc.com back up and runing (complicated somewhat by the fact that the front page currently segfaults PHP); Done a bit more work on Omnyom.com (What it is, what it looks like, how it works); and now updated this with… well, this.
So, a quiet weekend.
Price of a Pelican
Monday, August 9th, 2010Slightly late on this, but I’ve been catching up on the Planet Money podcast, which is about attempting to explain all the high-falutin’ concepts around economics and its occasional breakdowns in a way that makes it understandable to non-economists, and is well worth a listen. At the end of last month they did an episode called “Tallying Up The Pelican Bill” about environmental damage. Specifically, the money they are fined for the damage outlines costs for job losses and tourism charges, but there’s no line item for “Killed 4,000 pelicans”.
The blog post link above summarises the episode, although the actual show is better, as they go though various theoretical methods of working out how much a pelican is worth (from “You cannot put a price on life” meaning – in these terms – “They’re free” on down). Eventually, they come to a non-economic answer from the US governmental department responsible for dealing with this kind of issue: One pelican is worth… exactly one pelican. They require the fined company to invest in breeding centres and such to the point where they cause more pelicans to exist. Not the dollar value they were looking for, but means that BP don’t end up paying fines that end up bailing out those worthless penguins.
