Post PAX 2013 Thoughts

I realize that this post is getting rather old and dusty… But I haven’t been very good about writing, so I had it started so let’s see if I can finish it.

PAX 2013 was the first PAX I went to and it probably was the first convention I actually went to. The whole weekend was a lot of fun.

We had tickets for Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday most of our time was spent trying to get the Cards Against Humanity decks and going to panels. We actually hopped around quite a bit between panels. Many of which we went to about the first half hour and then jumped to the next panel.

Some of the panels were interesting, but ultimately I am not sure if they are my thing. They just seem a little more like watching someone else have a conversation. I feel too disconnected.  Sure there are jokes and good information that can come out of them. I think I just want more. My favorite panels I think were the ones that were much more scripted, where they knew that they were going to talk about and it was more of a presentation than a panel.

Sunday we went to a couple of the panels but we mostly spent time wandering the floor. It was crazy to see how elaborate the booths were. They weren’t just a dinky booth that had signs on it, they were huge elaborate productions. There were statues and props. It was fun to see all of it, but I don’t really like crowds and I really don’t get the desire to wait in long lines to play a game that is either coming out or already out.

One of the panels that we went to on Sunday was “Three Old Guys Play Zork” panel. The panel was a little mislabeled since ultimately the crowd ended up playing Zork, people would go up and give commands for them to type in.  But for some reason it was enjoyable.  Maybe it was because they talked about the history of video games a little and then we essentially played an old story based video game as a whole crowd.

I did end up playing a couple games. It was a little sad to see the number of games that were for the iPad. I don’t game nearly as much as I used to, not that I ever really gamed that much. I don’t seem to have the time for the long RPGs, so now I want fun little games that I can focus on for short sprints. Like Jetpack, Mario Kart, Commander Keen, etc. But it seemed like so many interesting games that might fit in that realm were being made for the iPad, and I don’t want to get an iPad. Two of the PC games that stuck out were Dive Kick and Samurai Gunn. I wasn’t sure what to expect for Samurai Gunn. It ended up being much more about timing and strategy than I had expected and was a lot of fun to play. I kind of wish that they would work on the graphics a little more.  I know that they were going for more of an older game, but I feel like they went NES and I prefer SNES. Dive Kick was a lot of fun for how simplistic of a game it was.

I think the most enjoyable part of PAX was seeing all of my new friends from the cruise again.

P.S. I was surprised to find that it doesn’t appear that there is an archive of PAX. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but I couldn’t find any copies of things as simple as schedules of panels on the internet.

The GoBe

A year and a half ago (or so) I saw this crazy project on Indiegogo, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/healbe-gobe-the-only-way-to-automatically-measure-calorie-intake. The GoBe, http://healbe.com/, is supposed to revolutionize how we track our calories, doing it all automatically. I read through what I could find and ultimately decided it sounded interesting. They seemed to gloss over a lot about how it was supposed to work, but gave enough details to make it feel like they thought the system through.

Then I started hearing about people calling it a scam: https://pando.com/2014/03/20/on-indiegogo-a-miracle-health-device-raises-730k-and-a-whole-load-of-red-flags/. “Nothing like this exists, so it isn’t possible that someone else is making it.” Personally, I had fully understood that there is a chance that they can’t make it, but I was curious enough to get one. I was just surprised that people hadn’t thought it through before putting money on the line.

The original date for delivery came and went. Occasionally we got an update, but those were few and far between. This made people even more worried about it being a scam. But then, it showed up!

I can’t believe that this actually showed up!! #GoBe pic.twitter.com/gjW4wYjNfx

— Derek Mantey (@doolbneerg) July 10, 2015

Here are some first impressions, I have only had it for about a week. It seems to be tracking something related to calorie intake. It is really large and can be uncomfortable, especially when sleeping. Unfortunately, my wife’s broke within the first week, it always said that there is no contact. Luckily GoBe said that they are going to send a replacement.

Software seems really buggy and just young. The UI is slightly unclear, for example, there are up arrows and down arrows for consumed and burnt, neither really make sense. The water feature seems pointless since it seems like you have to enter that completely on your own.

The sleep feature has weird “heart episodes” listed like Arrhytmia and Bradycardia, that seems like they should have just left off, since they keep saying that this isn’t a medical device. And from what I can tell, Bradycardia isn’t actually necessarily bad.

The “automatic” calorie measure I think it my biggest issue so far. It is “automatic” in that it will attempt to read calories consumed, if you tell if when you eat by pressing the button on the side. However, I frequently forget to press the button. Then when you sync, it asks you if you ate during a time range with a bunch of other random times. I have frequently messed up when I ate and answering those questions such that I have lost whole meals. If you can handle the buttons and answering the questions about when you ate correctly, it won’t be able to tell how many calories you have consumed until your body has absorbed it all, which is about 3 hours. This means you can’t really use it to gauge if you can eat dessert. It only really tells you how you did yesterday.

At this point I am trying to get a clean set of days where I track calories in another app across several days to see how it actually performs. If the underlying technology works, then the software can be cleaned up to make it easier to use.