Blog :: Random Rambles
September 2008
I make a lousy race horse trainer
I had the opportunity this weekend to play one of those games where you breed your race horse, train it, and then race it.
I lost, badly.
Here’s the thing, though: I finally understand why horse games don’t make any money. It’s because they just aren’t realistic for people who actually know anything about riding.
Take “my” little race horse, for example: poor guy was born wasp-waisted and with hind legs on steroids. When the program showed him walking off a trailer, it looked like his entire hind end was collapsing. Despite the fact that is was only computer graphics—and bad ones at that—it was still painful to watch. (Although it would explain why my horse ran so poorly; he probably needed some serious chiropractic adjustments).
So: ugly, unrealistic (even scary) graphics. At least I could handle the care and training part, right?
Nope. Feed the horse some hay, and he wants a carrot. Give him a carrot, and he wants some hay. Horse is sad? Try to cheer him up, and he walks off in a huff. Horse does a good job and you praise him? He walks off in a huff. Punish the horse? He walks off in a huff.
I know that once you sort out the algorithm, the game would be easy enough to win, but who wants to spend all day trying to figure out how to make a computer horse happy when you could be making a real horse happy?
Your browser is an arthritic Shetland pony
Imagine if someone handed you a big, beautifully-moving warmblood, showed you an immaculately-groomed dressage area, and said, “Go ride the test of your life.”
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Now imagine they said, “But whatever test you ride, we want you to duplicate on this 12hh arthritic pony. Duplicate exactly. Down to the stride length and everything.”
Sort of sucks, doesn’t it? Especially when you say, “Hey, the warmblood is trained to do piaffe and passage, but the pony isn’t. Can I add that in in just the warmblood’s test?” Absolutely not. No way. No upper-level movements for you! Stick to only what the pony can handle.
That, seriously, is my life. Those of you who use IE6? Your browser is the pony in this situation. Maybe you are using it because you’ve used it for a long time, and it’s familiar and comfortable for you.
Allow me to reassure you: unlike real ponies, browsers are inanimate objects without any feelings whatsoever. You don’t owe browsers any sort of retirement. Please, put yourself out of your own misery and just upgrade. I don’t really care what you upgrade to—and goodness knows there are plenty of options—just upgrade.
(If you think that scenario was bad: I was once given the job equivalent of “We want you to ride this arthritic pony in this immaculately-groomed double-sized dressage ring and ride this beautiful warmblood on a steep mountain slope at midnight in the pouring rain in a round pen. Now make both rides look exactly the same.” That was fun. By “fun,” I mean “painful.”)
Sorry for this post. Google just launched a new browser, which is an interesting idea although the thought of having to design around yet another browser’s quirks is depressing. More to the point of my IE6 vent, I spent all day telling people, “You can do this, but not in IE6 unless you want to do X, Y, and Z workarounds” only to have them look at me like I’d lost my mind. They wanted to know why they couldn’t do whatever more easily than that.
The answer is simple: it’s because IE6 is an arthritic Shetland pony that simply cannot keep up with the big-moving warmblood browsers. Trying to make it do so is cruel. Well, not to IE6, which has no feelings, but to the developers who have to make it work.
To me, ok? To me. Like everything else on this blog, this post is all about me.
Save a developer. Upgrade your browser. Please. I can’t spend the rest of my life pulling out my hair.
August 2008
Gustav must have made the national news
As I was about to head out to a Labor day barbecue today, my mother called. Apparently Gustav made the national news. She was worried.
We established I have a plan in place. I got a couple numbers from her of people I could stay with in a couple different cities. I reminded her that there was the possibility of the cell phone towers losing power (I hear they did when Allison hit) and that if she couldn’t reach me, that was probably the reason why. I did not say “it won’t be because I’m floating in a ditch somewhere,” because parents have no sense of humor about some things.
When my aunt called twenty minutes later, I did tell her I wouldn’t be floating in a ditch, and she laughed. She had some additional contact numbers for me. It appears my mom called her. Oh, joy. Apparently my mom is still worried. Once my aunt, who lives in Hawaii and goes through this sort of thing all the time, established I had a plan and it was reasonable, we talked about important things, like politics.
Given my mom’s sudden worried call, I thought maybe I missed something on the news. Had Gustav turned towards Houston? I stopped watching the news because the newscasters were driving me crazy, and I really only check the NOAA site morning and evening because there’s no point in checking it more often than that right now. I didn’t think I’d missed anything, but who knows? I checked; I hadn’t. Luckless Louisiana is still the predicted target. That might change, but it doesn’t seem likely.
I am a little relieved that I don’t have to worry about a horse right now. Out of curiosity, I did some Googling to see what resources are available to horse owners. I’m a little surprised at how decentralized the information is; you almost have to know the answer before you search. Otherwise, you have to pick through lots of general articles, hoping they’ll mention a specific organization or location to contact for assistance. That’s… not helpful. Don’t get me wrong—there is a lot of very useful information out there. But the decentralized nature of the information makes it hard to find, especially for someone in a hurry. You might argue that horse owners can’t afford to be in a hurry—should be planning days in advanced where to go and how to get there—but you know everyone doesn’t do that. If Gustav takes a major jag after Cuba and centers on Houston, I am positive there will be people freaking out about where to go with their horses and how to get the horses out, and how are they going to find that information?
So, we’ll see. I hope my aunt called my mom back and calmed her down, since apparently I didn’t do such a good job.
Incidentally, I keep waiting to hear one of the presidential candidates has jumped off the campaign trail and headed down to the Gulf. Maybe they’ll wait until after the storm hits, so they can tour the disaster area and get some photo ops taken doing some volunteer work. Handing out bottles of water, that kind of thing. Gosh I’m cynical. Want to take bets on who gets here first and how long it takes them to arrive?
I have to go do something productive now. Like laundry.
Houston, we have traffic
Why does highway traffic flow up to the exit, right past the exit, and then, suddenly, come to a near halt? Only, 100 meters later, to speed up again? It’s like everyone suddenly realizes they passed an exit and they all feel the need to slam on the brakes: “Oh my god! An exit! Did everyone get off ok? All the new cars on? Everyone in their lanes? Yes? Phew. Let’s go then!” And off the zoom.
Seriously. I could understand if people were slowing down before or right at the exit, but 100 meters after? I don’t get it.
Not much going on for me; I just ended up in rush hour traffic today and came away baffled. And amused. Mostly baffled, though.
Political correctness is going to hurt horse breeding in the end
I saw a forum post recently where the poster said something like “I should apologize for stereotyping the entire breed…”
I actually laughed. Good thing I wasn’t at work. But seriously: breeds are stereotypes. That’s the entire point of a breed. It defines what the horses should look like, how they should move, sometimes even what their temperaments should be like. Breed requirements basically say, “When you think of an X horse, you should think of a horse like this.”
Of course every horse is an individual and no horse is going to exactly meet the breed standards, but when people reach a point where they are selling X breed horses and their marketing tactic is “these horses are nothing like what you’d expect of X breed!”... well, then what’s the point of calling them X breed? Similarly, when someone says “X breed typically does not do well in Y discipline,” this is not mean or offensive when X breed’s standards and Y discipline’s standards are complete opposites. Really. It is okay for a breed to be good at one thing and not good at another. It is not slamming a breed to point out they are not built to excel at the highest levels of a particular sport.
Most gypsy vanners will not make great cutting horses. I am not a great, big meanie for saying that. It’s biomechanics. (Someone is going to go out and find a photo of a gypsy vanner cutting to prove me wrong. That’s nice. I’ll be more impressed when you can provide me with as many photos of gypsy vanners cutting as I can provide you with quarter horses cutting. Then we can start talking about breed suitability.)
I think a horse’s breed should tell you something about their conformation, movement, and temperament, and when it doesn’t, the breeder is not doing their job with respect to their breed organization. I am all for looking at the horse in front of you as an individual, and being open to the possibility that the horse in front of you may not exactly match the breed’s standards, but I still would not go buy a draft horse and challenge my Thoroughbred-owning friends to a race. Well, maybe I would; but I wouldn’t whine when I don’t win and then claim it’s because the racing officials are prejudiced against drafts.
(I realize I haven’t really gotten around to the post title, but I do think this insistence on never, ever suggesting X breed may not excel in every discipline it enters is going to hurt breeds, because people will lose track of the long-term goals with respect to the breed as a whole. You’ll end up with… Quarter Horses, as an example. Put a halter-bred QH and an English Pleasure-bred QH in the same ring and explain to me how a single breed is producing two such extreme types. Don’t you sometimes feel like the AQHA has become more of a bloodline-tracking registry than an actual breed with well-defined and adhered-to standards?)