The situation:

• You take the bus to school
• You have a bus pass sticker on your student ID
• As the bus pulls up, you realize that you left your student ID in your other jacket
• You tell the driver, and their stoney face indicates you're going to need to pay the $1.75
• You reach in to your pocket, dig through your backpack, and find that you only have $1.50 (and a couple twenties, but really).
• You tell the driver you only have $1.50. What should you do?
• The driver says okay, but pay the quarter the next time.
• You say okay.

Okay, now flash-forward to tomorrow, when I step on to the bus, armed with my ID with bus sticker: What's my obligation? Should I pay the quarter? Am I really owed a $1.50 that I'll never get back? Do I just forget it and move on?

It's the little questions that can be fun.

It seems that I regualrly pull one all-nighter a week nowadays. Last night was that night for me, working on an assignment for Programming User Interfaces. Argh. I got to sleep for a couple hours between 9 and 11 this morning before my 11:30 class, yet I have class until 9:30 tonight, and then Rachel's picking me up from school and we're goin gto watch TiVoed Buffy (since we both have class at 8 on Tuesdays. Grr!)

Anyhow, my last project for Game Design was to write up a bit about my five favorite games. I shifted it around a little. Bango's gone, and Air Hockey, #5 until the last minute, didn't make the cut, when I remembered a game I had'nt played in years, but really want to again.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy it, especially the picture of my cousin Sara and the monster Cirbbage board.

Getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom I flipped awake my sidekick to read the email dreams that it collected as I was busy gathering my own. Sifting past the spam that always seems to fall heavier at night, I noticed the 'CNN Breaking News' that always grabs my attention. I'm always timid about reading these emails: will it be as benign as the FAA ordering an airline to inspect their planes, or was it a declaration of war on Iraq?

"-- NASA reports losing contact with space shuttle Columbia at 9 a.m. EST prior its scheduled landing at 9:16 a.m."

Reading the first few words, I thought I knew how to feel. 'Oh. NASA lost contact with another probe. Sheesh.' Then, 'NASA lost contact with the Shuttle. Wow. That's embarrassing. Reminds me of Spacecamp.' And finally, '16 minutes before landing? Shit.'

And of course, the next email from CNN was sitting there in my inbox, five minutes old:

"-- The space shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, broke up Saturday morning 200,000 feet above Texas. More soon"

I woke up Rachel to tell her what was going on, remembering just over a year ago on Sept 11 when Ammy woke me up to tell me that 'the world just got crazy.'

Rachel got up and we turned on the TV to a random channel.

Fixating on Rather and Blitzer, by the video clips and the developing story, there was a part of my head sitting in the back of the theater, so to speak, thinking I should feel differently than I did. Yes, I was horrified. Yes, I was stricken. Yet all the while I was comparing this experience to the morning of the Challenger explosion, looking for the reasons why this time the whole morning seemed somehow muted. I didn't need help coping with the tragedy.

I already know what to feel.

And I don't think I'm the only one: Over the course of the day I interacted with a bunch of people, and the only time Columbia even came up was when, after several minutes of talking without any mention of the accident, I asked them if they'd heard the news, just to be sure.

Challenger prepared us for the reality of a shuttle disaster. It reminded us that an astronaut's bravery isn't a hollow thing, and that accidents really can happen. As much as Tufte might have shown that Challenger was preventable, it wasn't because shuttles were inherently safe. Last year there were 15 million commercial aircraft flights in the United States and not a single fatality. When the shuttles were designed, they estimated that there could be a serious mishap (resulting in an RTLS, TAL, AOA, ATO or contingency abort) once every 50 launches.

Beyond Challenger though, 9/11 was the real primer for today. Beyond the fact that Challenger eliminated the surprised shock of such a tragedy, 9/11 gave us a sense of scope. Here was a shock that not only stretched wider, with initial estimates of 20,000 dead lowered to 6,000 and a month later to 3,000, but deeper, as it was just a starting point of a whole new world, and not the shiny kind. I didn't realize just how much we all grew up in the last 16 months until yesterday. Maybe jaded is a better term.

It's terrible to say, but there is some relief in experiencing a closed-end tragedy. The loss of seven lives, a three billion dollar spacecraft, and a dent in space exploration that could last from one to three years; these are all things to make us sad. But at the same time there's a salve in knowing it won't instigate UN resolutions, a half-trillion dollars in new military spending, killing of thousands of enemy troops, and the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction from enemies we're only learning to hate because they hate us.

The tragedy of a space disaster is something I already know how to feel. The emotions it evokes are emotions I can respect within myself and in others. This is sorrow, grief, and moving on. I only wish more tragedies could so easily be dealt with.

Damn. If you somehow have been hiding from the news, turn on the tv or visit your favorite news site.

So there are games missing, and of the 312 games on the list, only 175 currently have descriptions, and the whole thing is in a 13,000 word, 28 page PDF file, yadda-ya, but in all its state-of-fluxiness, this is My Game Toolbox version 1.0.

It will be added to and updated as time goes on, and may even be database driven, allowing others to add their own comments, memories, and rulesets for games. But that's for later.

Oh, and I got a coveted 'A' on Fitaly Jumpboard Hopscotch. Yay!

So, after listing over three hundred games, our next task is to pick our five favorite games, with the condition that the games can be demonstrated in a classroom setting. There's more to the assignment, analyzing the nature of the game, what makes it distinctive, and all that, but I won't bore you with those details.

Sifting through the full list in my head, I think I've settled on Fluxx, Cribbage, Zendo, and Bango (yeah, so we might have to go outside to demonstrate (and I'd need to borrow a wicked knife)) as my first three games. I'm still looking for a fifth, and I'm not married to Bango.

Am I missing something obvious? Not that your favorite is necessarily mine...

---

Okay, ditching Bango in favor of Karen's and my movie game... Maybe Bango will stay as #5 if I don't think of a good alternative.

One thing that got me praise in the hopscotch assignment was my use of pictures. Now that I'm doing the movie game, I wish I had a photo of the paper tablecloth Emily and I made at Rio Grill in Carmel, covering the entire tabel with a couple hundred actors and movies, all latticed together in a huge Gordian neural net knot.

Ahh, the inside jokes of working at Yahoo...

Before messenger clients go out to the masses in beta testing, we usually run alpha testing in-house. We post it inside the firewall for all the yahoos to download and use (and believe me, the average yahoo types far more words in instant messaging than says out loud on a given day) and see if any problems come up.

One day a server bug struck several dozen people using alpha copies. No matter what they typed into the composition window, all the other person would see is '3'.

Friend: Wanna grab some lunch?
Me: 3
Friend: isnt that a little late?
Me: 3

the problem was fixed by the end of the day, but for months amongst a small group of yahoos, the bug 'lingered on', always at the most opportune moments.

Manager: how're the mocks coming?
Me: 3
Manager: Quit it.
Me: 3

I miss the 'hoo.

The week that G. W. Bush was inaugurated two years ago, The Onion ran a piece titled Bush: "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosparity is Finally Over."

I'd be saying 'It's funny because it's true' if I also had the luxury of saying 'It's funny because it's happening to someone else.'

Truly, the Onion is staffed by genius.

I had the oddest dream last night: Me and two of my friends in the HCI Masters program went back in time three hundred years to talk to their equivalent of an interaction designer. I lost most of it, but I remember thinking "Ooh! Let's tell him about affordances!"

Just for fun (okay, and procrastination): Choose your own font for Fury.

If you choose a custom font, make sure you spell it right, or it won't work!

(how obvious is it that I'm just pimping myself for the best programmed website bloggie?)