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And, obviously, un-spellchecked signs.

While talking about our upcoming Photon adventure, Jeff brought up an interesting point. Photon, unlike most laser tag arenas of today, had culture.

As I mentioned the other day, the idea for Photon was born out of Star Wars — and while specific Star Wars references were hard to find (and, I’m guessing, intentionally avoided), Photon had a definite theme. Players weren’t referred to as “players” — they were Photon Warriors (and greeted as such upon entering the arena). Photon arenas were complete transformations, labyrinths and ramps covered in gray carpet, washed in red and green lights and, during “intruder alerts”, moving spotlights. Fog filled the ground level of the arena, adding to the atmosphere. And then there was the Photon soundtrack that blasted along during every single game (no pumping in generic rock tunes here).

No one wore camouflage to Photon — why would you? Photon Warriors were outer space combatants, not jungle soldiers. A Photon Warrior’s uniform consisted of as much black as possible, from head to toe. (Well okay, technically not your head — it was covered in a red or green helmet, with a “space lice protector” layered between the two.) It was fairly simple to spot new Photon players; those were the kids wearing white.

Even though I never saw an official map, each section of the Photon arena had a name. The back platform that oversaw the floor below was the Crow’s Nest (or the Sniper’s Nest, depending on where you played). The flat area that sat just above the base? Bookshelves. The center of the arena held a giant bunker. Like grade school kids playing backyard football, crude plans were drawn up before the beginning of each game. “The two of us will run to the Crow’s Nest. You guard the base. After the first Intruder Alert, we’ll come down and relieve you. You two hold the corners for the first three minutes.” I don’t know that any our plans ever worked, but it sure was fun pretending that they might.

And even if you weren’t *playing* Photon, you wanted to be *at* Photon. Downstairs sat a couple of space-themed arcade games (Asteroids and Space Invaders, if I remember correctly). Upstairs sat the snack bar. Overseeing the entire playfield was “the obersvation deck,” an area filled with a dozen or so arcade games and mounted laser guns that visitors could use to shoot players below (the guns did not affect players’ gameplay). Playing Photon was just one part of hanging out at Photon. Strategies and tips were constantly being traded among players. Sometimes, hanging out and talking about Photon was almost as much fun as actually playing Photon. Almost.

Although I never directly participated in one, there were Photon teams and leagues — some local, some regional, some even national. During the mid-to-late 1980s, Photon arenas were opening up across the country. There were only two different layouts for Photon arena, and we (Oklahoma City) had an Alpha Field, the more common of the two. I can remember teams from Dallas visiting our field on a regular basis. Scores and stories were swapped between veteran warriors while younger players sat and listened in awe.

Today, things are different. The closest laser tag field to my house is a mish-mash of thoughts. The motif is equal parts futuristic and Egyptian … because everybody knows how popular the sport of laser tag was among ancient Egyptians. The maze consists of painted plywood, splatter paint and blacklights. The music typically consists of a local radio station being pumped into the arena. Photon made you feel like you were actually being whisked away to Planet Photon. The arenas today make you feel as if you are being whisked away to someone’s warehouse.

The culture of Photon extended beyond the arenas. There were Photon novels, a television show, piles of merchandise and even a home version of the game. But more than that, Photon lived on in the people who played it. The stories of old warriors are still shared today via websites, forums and newsgroups. And maybe that’s why I’m so interested in visiting the Tulsa field this one time. It’s not just about playing Photon — it’s about experiencing that culture, even if it is twenty years later, one last time.

Last night after the kids went to bed I was able to skip out for a couple of hours and take a quick tour of Liberty City. As my gamer friends already know, Liberty City (the pseudonym for New York City) is the town where Grand Theft Auto 4 takes place.

Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 were drawn in a top-down perspective, and while they were fun for their time, neither made much of a lasting impression. It wasn’t until Grand Theft Auto 3 hit shelves that the series really began to make waves. Grand Theft Auto 3, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas and later GTA: Liberty City Stories all became best sellers for platforms including the Playstation 2, Xbox, and later, portable gaming systems including the Game Boy Advance and Sony’s PSP.

And so here we are with a new generation of consoles, and a new generation of Grand Theft Auto games. Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4) again takes place in Liberty City. Although I’ve never actually been to New York City, you can get a pretty good idea of what it must be like from GTA4. The streets and cityscape are the same. According to recent articles, a lot of time went into recreating sections of New York in the game, and Rockstar’s efforts paid off; the result is a city that, for all intents and purposes, feels alive. Traffic moves along, people stand around chatting with one another, birds fly in the distance.

GTA4 puts players in control of Nico Bellic, a Serbian who has been come to Liberty City to meet his cousin (and small time crook) Roman. When Nico arrives he discovers that Roman’s tales of wealth and women have been greatly exaggerated (to say the least). The plot, as it is slowly unveiled to players, involves honor and revenge. As the story’s twists and turns reveal more twists, you (as a player) become more involved in the game’s story. More than a game, GTA4 is like an interactive movie, where you play the starring role and can impact the path the story will take.

Like the games before it, Grand Theft Auto 4 is a “sandbox” game, which means players can go anywhere and do anything. To put it in perspective, imagine if in Super Mario Bros. you could simply say, “eh, I don’t feel like chasing down Bowser today. Instead, I’m going to go to the store, buy some new overalls, and go watch television instead.” In GTA4, you can do just that — in fact, it seems like you can do almost anything. Obviously your actions are limited to what developers thought of and programmed into the system, but when you decide to pick up a girl, drive her to the local bowling alley and go bowling, it seems as though they thought of an awful lot. In a sandbox game, moving the plot along becomes less of a mandatory goal and more of a suggestion. When Roman calls you on your phone and asks you to come pick him up from work, you can … or, you can ditch him, go pick up one of your girls, take her out for a hot dog, and shoot the cart vendor in the head for dessert.

Make no mistake, Grand Theft Auto 4 (like its predecessors) is rated M (for mature) for a reason. The game is bursting at the seams with adult themes, language, and violence. That whole “sandbox” aspect is a double-edged sword. There’s nothing stopping gamers from punching random strangers in the face, mowing down pedestrians in a stolen Hummer, or leading cops on high speed chases for hours at a time. If you want to attack innocent people all day long and stomp on their heads until brains and blood cover the sidewalk, there’s nothing stopping you (although you might refrain from telling your shrink about it). Even when directly following the game’s story mode you’ll be fighting (and killing) other characters. It’s not on me to tell you what your kids should or shouldn’t be playing, but those who complained about the violence in Mortal Kombat just a few years ago will surely faint the first time they hear a Liberty City hooker beg for her life as you empty a clip into her gut and take her cash.

New to GTA4 is online gaming. If you throught the depravity of Grand Theft Auto was fun in your own home, now you can share those adventures with fellow online gamers. Up to sixteen players can duke it out in one of fifteen different online modes. Some are team vs. team, others are co-op in nature. The online game are addictive, and I suspect many gamers will pick up this title for these alone. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn many gamers stick solely to the online matches and never play through the story mode itself.

Grand Theft Auto has hit the current generation of consoles running. It is both completely new and completely familiar at the same time. While the core of the game is still very Grand Theft Auto, every aspect of the original games has been expanded upon — as well it should be, with a reported budget of $100 million (making it the most expensive videogame ever made). With several gaming sites rating GTA4 10/10, it seems that next-gen gamers have finally been granted their “killer app.” It would not surprise me to find groups of 360/PS3 gamers in the future that only own one single game — this one. The exhaustive maps, in depth story mode (rumored to take around 40 hours to complete) and the continually fresh source of online matches is bound to keep gamers entertained for years.

Or, until the next Grand Theft Auto game hits stores.

You Don’t Know Flack Episode 104 - Console Copiers

Click on the embedded MP3 player below, or Right-Click/Save As

Episode 104 is about my history and love of console copiers, those black market devices used to dump (and play) cartridge ROMs on videogame consoles.

Related Link: 17 Mistakes Microsoft Made in the Xbox Security System (Video)
Related Link: Hohocon
Related Link: Rob Webb’s Console Copier Page

I couldn’t tell you exactly when Oklahoma’s Photon Laser Tag Arena opened. The first franchise Photon opened in Toronto in June of 1985, and the company folded in 1989 – so, it was definitely somewhere between those two points in time.

It has been said (on Wikipedia) that George Carter III (the inventor of Photon) got the idea for the sport while watching Star Wars. That, I do not doubt. While playing Photon, I felt like I was on an alien planet; like I was really in Star Wars. A transformation took place when we strapped on their twenty pounds of gear. No longer were we high school geeks, sci-fans, or dreamers – we were Photon Warriors.

Jeff was my Photon buddy. The two of us built a friendship in mid-high based on our common love of computers (Commodore 64), music (Motley Crue and Ozzy), and movies (horror and sci-fi). I was short, chunky and sarcastic; Jeff was my tall and lanky straight man. We were the R2D2 and C3P0 of our school. While neither of us could have been mistaken for athletes, there was something about Photon that attracted us like moths to a distant laser beam.

Games of Photon lasted six minutes and cost $3. While it was too expensive for us to play all day, we dropped $10-$20 regularly on weekends. Shortly after our local Photon opened they introduced the Zappy Pass — $30 for unlimited games for a single day. Since you could blast through $20 in an hour at Photon, the Zappy pass made perfect economical sense. I can remember many, many Saturdays where Jeff and I would purchase Zappy Passes and attempt to play every single game. Starting at 10am and going through 1am, the two of us would play Photon, exit the arena, and immediately go get in line for the next game. I have distinct memories of standing outside Photon in the chilly, dark night, crying due to leg cramps. The only breaks we would take throughout the day would be for lunch at Photon (hot dog and nachos) and dinner (hot dog and nachos). To some it probably appeared as if we were simply trying to get the most for our money, but it wasn’t about that. It was about playing as much Photon as possible.

And then there was the summer my family went on vacation to Chicago. Jeff went with us. That same summer, Chicago had just opened a Photon next to my grandmother’s house. By this point in time, Jeff and I had been playing Photon for two or three years regularly. And, in Chicago, we kicked ass. We kicked everybody’s ass. We were so good that two employees challenged Jeff and me, two fifteen-year-olds, to a two-on-two battle – and we kicked THEIR asses! Back in Oklahoma, Jeff and I were good, but against a group of people who had never played the game before … it was a massacre.

I’m not a business man and I don’t claim to know what happened behind the scenes at Photon. All I know is, one day Jeff and I pulled up to our Photon’s front doors and found them closed. Permanently. Initially there were rumors of players pooling their money together, purchasing the building and reopening Photon, but that never happened. Eventually the building was gutted. First, it became a church. Then it became a discount furniture store. Then it burned down, and that was the end of that.

Over the past twenty years, off and on, I’ve been haunted by the memories of Photon. I’ve walked through that playing field many times in my dreams. I’ve tried playing other forms of Laser Tag over the years, but none of them are the same. None of them come close, in fact. Gradually, I came to the realization that I will never again experience Photon.

They say you should never say never, and I guess that is true. While surfing the web one day last year I discovered a fellow by the name of Jim Strother. Jim Strother loved Photon, too. Jim Strother loved Photon so much that he has built his own Photon field. When I discovered this information I thought, no matter where it is, I must go and see there. Then I found out Jim Strother lives just outside Tulsa, about a hundred miles from me.

Jim has been working for the past year or so on getting his brand new Photon center open. He’s posted notes and pictures of his work in progress. An entire legion of former Photon players has been following his updates via forums, newsgroups, and websites. Jim’s new Photon was set to open within the next few weeks, and people from all over the country were set to fly to Tulsa, Oklahoma to re-experience Photon once again. I suspect these people are a lot like me.

And then, bad news. Jim Strother announced this weekend that his Photon will not open. He’s behind in rent — $64,000, to be exact – and has been served eviction papers. I was heartbroken, until I read Jim’s follow up message.

Next weekend, for one night only, Photon will open its doors.

Starting next Saturday at 5pm and going throughout the night, Jim will be running Photon. He’s already issued a few caveats: the pods and computers aren’t 100% tuned and the lobby isn’t entirely finished. I can’t imagine those details would keep a single person away, not the kind of people that were (and are) planning on attending.

For one more night, once again, Jeff and I will be Photon Warriors – although, truth be told, going and seeing the place is more important to me than actually playing the game. To see, hear, feel, and smell that arena one more time … I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

It’s a vicious trend — the older I get and the more games I collect, the less time I have to play them — especially with others. I have piles of new games, old games, and arcade games that collect dust on a day-to-day basis. A couple of times throughout the year, some friends of mine and I organize “game nights” — a time and place where “big kids” can get together, forget about school/work/kids for a while and spend some time talking about, trading, and most importantly, playing games.

As several of my online friends were coming in from out of town to attend OEGE last weekend, we decided that after the show would be a great time for everyone to get together and have a game night. I volunteered my place (only fifteen minutes away from the OEGE show location).

My house was divided up into three main gaming locations: upstairs, downstairs, and the arcade (my backyard shed, converted into an 80’s-style arcade). Upstairs was easy — it already functions as a fulltime gameroom, with systems from the Atari 2600 and the NES all the way to the Xbox 360 and PS3 hooked up, ready for gaming action. Downstairs the Wii was hooked up to our main television, and tables were set up to accomidate additional gaming systems and/or trade boxes. The arcade didn’t need much work at all, other than a bit of vaccuuming and Windexing.

The cool (and sometimes stressful) thing about game nights are 1, you never know who’s going to show up, and 2, you never know what people are going to want to do. As anyone who’s ever thrown one can tell you, you never know what people are going to want to see or do for sure.

Namzep, Josh, Icbrkr and Crossbow talk about games.

For the next six hours, Icbrkr, Phosphor Dot Fossils and Kent (from Arkansas), Ubikuberalles (from New Mexico), Gapporin (from Missouri), as well as several Okies including Namzep and Tim (from Stillwater), Neist (from Norman, Crossbow, Vicky and Josh Risner (from Tulsa) along with myself and my good buddy spent the evening gaming. (Yes, I’m aware these people all have real names.) Several people brought their “trade boxes” — bins full of things they don’t want and would like to trade for things they do want — and a lot of time was spend wheeling and dealing in the living room.

OVGE founder Crossbow digs through someone’s trade box.

The arcade was a success, warts and all. There are many cooler arcades out there and I have no delusions about the state of my own. Sometimes where people see “arcade games” I see chunks of wood with scratches, patched-together controls and tired monitors. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and (thankfully) there were no technical meltdowns during the festivities. Classic arcade machines are cantankerous at best.

Icbrkr kicks off the arcade with a little Mortal Kombat 3 action as Kent looks on.

Attending OEGE along with people’s long drives took their toll on the partygoers. By 11pm things were winding down; Icbrkr, Gapporin and Ubikuberalles sauntered off to claim their respective bunks. One by one the faithful gamers admitted defeat and parted ways. It was an honor to to have so many people travel so far to come visit, hang out, and share the love of videogames with me and others, and I can’t wait until the next time.

OEGE After Party Pictures

Last Saturday (April 26th, 2008) marked the debut of the Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo (OEGE). Unrelated to the already established Oklahoma Videogame Expo (OVGE), OEGE is a new show that took place at Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC). The show was sponsored by OCCC’s Computer Arts & Technology Society (CATS), and was spearheaded by student and club member Drew Stone. The first draft of this post was well over five pages long; I’ve since removed 90% of the details, and decided to go with this more generic review of the show instead. A review of the OEGE After Party (which took place at my house) will follow later today.

OEGE was plagued with issues from word go. Drew tapped CATS and OCCC as sponsors for the show, but as he soon found out, linking your event with such organizations (especially a school) is a double-edged sword. The upside is you can get lots of floor space inexpensively; the downside is, you have to play by their rules. From what I understand, red tape school politics delayed the launch of a website to the point where it never happened. With no website or official advertising, the show was doomed to a low turnout from the start.

The only official advertising I saw was a PDF flyer which was posted on one forum (I downloaded the flyer and rehosted it on my own site just so I could post links to it — it was the only way I knew to get the word out about the show!). Taken from the flyer:

“Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo is a day of video-game revelry. Our 2008 Expo will mark the first gaming destination in Oklahoma- where gamers and industry insiders can come together to celebrate video-games. Attendees come to OEGE to experience the newest games, encounter game industry legends, compete in tournaments, buy games, and meet with friends.”

Based on the above text, friends of mine from Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and even New Mexico drove to Oklahoma City to attend OEGE, in hopes of experiencing the newest games and encountering game industry legends. Instead, they found four vendors, two game stations, and an CATS booth. Of the four vendors, two were videogame related. One was Vintage Stock, a midwest-based gaming chain. The other was Phosphor Dot Fossils, who was there to debut his Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD (it’s fantastic — review coming soon!). The other two vendors were selling comic books and board games. Aside from the four vendors there were two game stations — an Xbox 360 running Guitar Hero, and a Wii (hooked up to a projector) playing a few different games (mostly Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

The word on the show’s floor was that several vendors either cancelled or pulled out at the last minute. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes. What I do know is we had seen everything the show had to offer in less than half an hour. While it was a nice opportunity to see all my online friends in person again, there wasn’t much for us to do there. Icbrkr and Gapporin played a few rounds of Guitar Hero at the show (a game both of them own at home, too). Had I driven from another state to attend the show I might have forced myself to stay longer … but I didn’t. After looking at everything on the showroom floor two or three times, most of us split — first, to eat, followed by a bit of thrift store game hunting.

Thanks to all the vendors who did show up, and congrats to Drew Stone and company for pulling off their first event. I’m sure the gang learned some tough lessons first hand this time around, and I expect great improvements will be made to next year’s show.

OEGE 2008 Photos

From the Seattle Times:

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

So, who’s got a copy for me?

I fly down the stairs, feet moving so quickly I almost trip over them. Rounding the corner I dodge Morgan, pop into my office, and remove my workstation from the domain. As that machine begins to reboot I jog back to the living room and begin moving downloaded utilities from my laptop to a memory stick. Once the copy begins it’s back upstairs to try and pull more data out of backups. No, this isn’t some new sort of nerd Olympics — unforunately, it was my Monday night.

We’ve become so reliant and comfortable with Microsoft patches that patching and rebooting a machine, even an important server, seems mundane. (I don’t want to hear it from the Linux crowd; my Ubuntu machine downloads as many if not more patches on a day-to-day basis.) When I checked my home server Monday morning and saw that it had downloaded new patches, I didn’t think twice about applying them and rebooting. In fact I thought so little of it that I didn’t even stick around to make sure the server came back online. For the record, it didn’t.

Data recovery is a funny thing that almost never works as well or as smoothly as you think and hope it will. My personal backup scheme goes above and beyond that of most end users and some businesses. Once machines are loaded and configured, snapshot images (using Acronis) are made and stored. In addition, “data” is backed up on a nightly basis as well. By “data” I don’t mean applications, but my own personal files. In other words, I don’t back up Microsoft Word on a nightly basis, but I do backup my Word documents.

On a recent episode of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie demonstrated how to escape from a sinking car. The technique involved waiting for the car to fill with water, opening door, and swimming to safety. Even with a tried-and-true plan in place and the knowledge that they were filming a television show, Adam still panicked and had to be given emergency oxygen. Even the best plans fall apart in a moment of panic; such is the often case when a hard drive fails. Even though I perform regular backups, it is sometimes difficult to function when all you can think about is the fear of losing almost fifteen years of digital photos and tons of original documents. During these times it is imperitive to follow preset plans and not lose your head.

I worked from 3:30pm Monday until almost 3:30am Tuesday morning reloading, restoring, and recovering data. My backup plan worked good, but not great. In retrospect, I should take more frequent snapshots of my server, or at least my application directory. After working for almost 12 hours straight on getting IIS, MySQL, Wordpress and PHP to talk to one another, I threw in the towel and called my good buddy Jeff at Managed Data Solutions to bail me out. Within the hour Jeff had everything up and running, and once again I owe him dinner.

I learned a bit more about backups this time without too sharp of a sting. 24 hours later I’m back up and running, with 0% data loss.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

From 1985-1991, I competed in Odyssey of the Mind. (Side rant: Odyssey of the Mind was originally known as Olympics of the Mind back when I began participating. Apparently the aggressive and somewhat litigious International Olympic Committee forced the name change — not that there was any chance of people confusing a bunch of underaged geeks building crap out of cardboard, paper mache’ and poster paints with a gathering of international atheletes, but whatever. The O in OM (which is all we ever called it anyway) was quietly changed from “Olympics” to “Odyssey” and we all carried on about our business.)

The point of OM was to put together a team and solve one long-term problem. Each year, four or five different long-term problems were presented to choose from. Although the problems changed each year, there were five general categories in which the problems fell: vehicle problems, technical problems, Classics, structure (”building a bridge out of balsa wood”), and performance. Over the years I think I tried all of them except the balsa wood one. Once the problems were announced, we formed teams of 5-7 kids and went to work. After working on the problem for a few months, we all travelled to “state competition” and competed against other groups of nerdy kids. For us this took place in Ada, Oklahoma. If you won at state, you moved on to nationals. I had a few friends who went to nationals over the years. My teams never made the cut. This is all a huge simplification of Odyssey of the Mind; if you want to know more, Wikipedia has a nice summary.

While each of these problems had pages upon pages of rules (and potential penalties), the most serious penalty a team could receive was a “Spirit of the Problem” violation. A Spirit of the Problem violation meant that you basically didn’t solve the problem — essentially, you failed to meet the minimum requirements. For example, let’s say the problem was to make a grilled cheese sandwich. If you made a sandwich but burned it, you might lose five points; if you didn’t manage to assemble a sandwich at all, that would be a Spirit of the Problem violation. The most you could score was 100. While most other penalities ranged from 1 to 5 points, a Spirit of the Violation problem penalized a team 100 points or so, essentially reducing your score 0 (and beyond).

One important thing to mention here is that we (the kids) were responsible for all ideas and work. Each team had a coach, but it was against the rules for s/he to give us ideas or perform any work (except for anything deemed dangerous to kids — welding, for example).

The first time any of my teams received a Spirit of the Problem violation was I believe in seventh grade. A few friends of mine and I had taken on a vehicle problem. The problem consisted of a real life 10×10 grid. On the grid were 3 randomly placed treasures, and 3 randomly placed dangers. Our first task was to write a computer program that would generate a path throughout the grid that would pick up all the treasures, and avoid all the pitfalls. Once the computer provided the solution, the solution had to be conveyed to whoever was operating the vehicle, who would then steer it around the real life grid, following the computer’s path. Basically, we had three problems to solve: writing the computer program, conveying the computer’s solution to the vehicle operator, and building a vehicle. All of this had to be performed non-verbally, and the computer was situated so that the vehicle operator could not see the monitor.

Even in 7th grade, I was doing quite a bit of Apple programming. We decided that it would be much simpler for a computer operator to generate the solution, so instead of having the computer solve the problem, I wrote a graphical 10×10 grid that could be maneuvered by using the Apple II’s arrow keys. Pressing “plus” dropped a treasure in a grid, and “minus” dropped a danger. Once those were in place, the computer operator could maneuver around the virtual grid, and the arrow keys left a little trail. The system we invented to convey the results to the vehicle operator involved a 10×10 grid painted on a piece of wood with Christmas lights mounted to it. If I remember correctly, blue lightbulbs represented the path, green meant treasure and red meant pitfall. The person operating the board would look at the computer screen and enter fill the grid in with lightbulbs. If that sounds cheesy, wait until you hear about our vehicle. Basically, it was a giant pair of shoes. One of the requirements was that the vehicle operator had to be four inches off the ground, so we nailed a couple of 2×4s to the bottom of two sheets of wood, and ran rope through the wood so that you could hold on to the shoes. The vehicle had to carry two people, so with two of us on the shoes holding ropes, we walked around the grid, collecting our treasure.

Shortly after our performance, we were informed that we had received not one, but two Spirit of the Problem violations. (In retrospect, I’ve never heard of anyone else receiving two.) First, we were told that “shoes are not a vehicle.” I don’t remember the specifics but I can only assume there were some details somewhere about what qualified as a vehicle that we did not meet. And second, at the competition they informed us that the computer was to generate the solution, not a person. Oops. Out of 100 possible points, I think we scored a -175.

Sometimes when I am programming at work on something I thought about that OM project. I’m not sure I could program the thing now any better. Maybe I’ll try again one of these days.