Morning!

Its WAAAY too early again, but somehow both taxlady and I are both awake. I thats because we both fell asleep by 9:00 pm last night. Yup, a couple of late-night wild party animals are we! Anyway, we're thinking of doing some early-morning grocery shopping and such, because the weather network is saying things like "storm warning" and "15-20 cm of snow" etc, etc, etc.  If we're gonna end up snowbound, I would rather we did it with a full larder.

Thoughts of Simulations and Breakfast

Speaking of breakfast, I think I'll make some Bacon and Eggs, and maybe some Hashbrowns if I can get taxlady to clean a couple of taters...

But that is NOT what I wanted to post about here. It just occured to me that there has been feature drift in the Sims project since I first wrote the proposal letter and now. (Actually there has been MASSIVE feature drift, but most of it is completely compatible.)

The sudden sticking point that I just realized is that the giftshop version of the program, that lets you wander though the streets of Montreal at various points in the past, would be an offline version. (Insisting that users have internet access - while not draconic - will increase returns from clueless customers to unacceptable levels). This is fine, except that my current mental model of the template object model requires installation to use an online e-money protocol that reencrpts while branding the objects with the current owner's name and address.  Hmm.

This is not a MAJOR sticking point, since I don't actually need a solution to this until the design is well under way, which won't happen until after any negotiations. Still, for consistency, I would like to solve the issue.  I can think of a few options off the top of my head:

1. Burn a new CD for each customer at the giftshop kiosk. This is just wrong in so many ways I won't even consider it further.
2. Have the version on the CD contain nothing but objects that are marked freely transferable, and have some kludge where they are currently 'owned' by a special null entity. During install an offline version of the protocol is capable of transfering ownership from the null entitiy to a user.
   
3. Create a non-reusable branding of objects that merges them completely into a game program. Then, although based on the same engine, the giftshop game would not be compatible with the rest of the system.
   
4. We combine 2 and 3 by having a way to 'seal' a game object and all of its sub-objects with a key, and again use a special entity key. The game would be usable and copyable but not extensible until unsealed via an online registration process.

All of the viable options seem to be non-trivial, and all of them seem to involve dangerous extenstions to the object encryption and or e-cach model. I have a niggling feeling though that there is a much simpler and easier solution that I'm currently overlooking. Anyone have any ideas?

The Chicken Song!

Gonna go shop now, but I just wanted to say, I really LIKE the chicken song!


...
Skin yourself alive, learn to speak Arapaho,
Climb inside a dog, and behead an Eskimo!
Now you've heard it once, your brain will spring a leak,
And though you hate this song, you'll be humming it for weeks!

Hold a chicken in the air, stick a deck chair up your nose,
Buy a jumbo jet and then bury all your clothes.
La la la la la...