Safety Fork, the

Minneapolis Institute of Arts I’d traveled about a whole block of my drive home tonight when I pulled over to take this picture. This is the kind of shot I never got in college, when I hardly ever carried my camera because I couldn’t have afforded a replacement if I’d broken it—faulty logic.

I started playing Bioshock yesterday. The computer I keep mostly for games meets only the minimum requirements. There aren’t half as many new games I want to play as there were six years ago, so upgrading isn’t as much a value proposition as it used to be for me.

I was surprised to find a prominent (above the title) “Only on XBox 360 and Windows” logo on the game box. I sympathize with the decision to limit the target platform—it’s strongly favored by the technical and economic realities of commercial software—but I don’t understand bragging about it. We’ve made the same decision where I work, and while I believe it’s a sound business decision, it’s certainly not a feature. In fact, every time I make an engineering decision that will force users of the software I write to fulfill a precondition, I feel vaguely embarrassed.

I hope they’re getting kickbacks or something from Microsoft for badging their packaging, because it’s otherwise a waste of ink. Even the least intelligent, most impulsive consumer I can imagine isn’t going to change his mind and buy a game because he finds out it won’t run on a computer he doesn’t own.

A massive infestation of school-age children appeared in Eden Prairie last night, popping into existence on sidewalks and streetcorners. By the time I was on my way to work, a vast armada of yellow busses had already been deployed to vacuum up the kids and their bags of brand-new pencils and cartoon-theme binders and four-function calculators.

The City of Eden Prairie (so far as I can deduce) spends its entire treasury on three things: police cars, school busses, and roads. Perpetrators and pupils are consumed daily by patrol cars and school busses, respectively, although in numbers the latter far eclipse the former. All are carted off to city-owned facilities into which entry by the general public is prohibited. Some time later, laborers appear and begin to construct roads. Conservation of mass and the sheer scale on which these activities occur dictate that somewhere, an unappetizing process—like the fusion of those by which are made the proverbial laws and sausages—must be converting the collected persons directly into paving materials, No. 2 pencils and all.