I'm a man of many contradictions, or as one friend put it, "the most extravagant frugal person I know."  Hey, it's not easy!  For one thing, this fancy schmancy Xbox 360 of mine has an appetite for expensive games.  I'm not the type to go out and drop $60 on a game without a fight, so I have looked high and low for ways to lessen the pain.  There are several options out there: renting (so-so selection, expensive), online rental services (looooong transit times), used games (woopty doo a whole $5 off).  What's a cheapskate gamer to do?  I thought I had found my angle about a month ago, when I stumbled across a pair of game trading services.  Gamershare and Goozex both act as matchmakers for gamers who want to trade their used games.  The services give gamers credit when they send games out, and deduct credit when they receive games.  Simple enough?  It would seem so, and I had a small stash of Xbox games to play with.  With the skepticism of Forrest Gump, I jumped in and started trading.

Gamershare was the first service I tried (since it was the first one I found).  I listed 5 of my older games (I had to send a request to have Silent Scope added to their database) and within a few hours I had a trade request.  Boo ya!  The next day I packed up the game, case and all, and went to mail it off.  The postage was about $3, so that was my first shock: those things are heavy!  I quickly realized (since they told me several times on the site) that I didn't need to send the plastic case.  After that I just sent the cover and manual along with the disc.  Much better on the wallet.
Sending out games is fine and all, but I was really interested in the receiving end of things.  I wish I could say something positive about it, but... I'm still waiting for my first game to arrive.  About a week after I signed up, I noticed that King Kong was available (one of the first available 360 games I saw on the site).  I jumped right on it, and after 5 or 6 days it finally showed up as "sent" on my account page.  It was supposedly sent out on the 17th of August with an incorrect state abbreviation, and is now on its way to me a second time.  We'll see.  Yes, the problem with this "peer to peer" system is that you're relying on your fellow man to send you the game as promised, when promised.  Depending on your worldview, this may be a real stretch.

The other major problem with  Gamershare (for me anyway) is the lack of Xbox 360 games available for trade.  I probably shouldn't complain too loudly about this since I have yet to put a 360 game up myself, but the site administrators do not appear to be seeding any Xbox 360 games at all.  It's frustrating to have plenty of GamerPoints but nothing on which to spend them.

Finally, the site itself is not without its flaws.  I've encountered a few instances where "mailed on" dates changed after the fact, and tonight I found out that I can't get a 17-point game even though I have 20 points in my account.  To their credit, all of my inquiries to them have elicited prompt and courteous responses.  They seem to be on the ball with customer service, so I'm sure they'll fix whatever is wrong with my point total.  I'm just not sure it will happen in time for me to get the game.

The second site in this not-very-crowded space is Goozex.  They start out in second place because I found them second, and because their name would fit in great on the Web 2.0 Company or Star Wars Character quiz.  I tried to look past that and took a spin around the site.  The first thing I noticed was a much larger number of available games (i.e. more than one) for the Xbox 360.  Hallelujah!  I quickly ran into one of the website's main problems though: the search feature was very non-intuitive.  If you clicked on the Xbox 360 logo to search for 360 games and you want to search for games on any console, you... click on the Xbox 360 logo again.  Even though it's not highlighted or otherwise emphasized.  Demerits for bad usability.

My next "oh darn" moment came when I realized that I couldn't request any of the available games!  Gamershare starts new users out with 9 GamerPoints, which is enough to request one recent game without contributing to the system.  While it probably contributes to the situation I mentioned above (no available games), it does let the new user try the system out without risk.  Goozex starts new users out with one "trade credit" offers 200 game points after a successful trade, but doesn't give out enough to get a game right off.  So, with all of my games sent away via Gamershare, I had exactly one title left to offer on Goozex.  Offer it I did, and it was picked up after a few days... by Goozex.  Interesting... they're buying games FROM their customers?  I guess it's a form of seeding (I have read that they are adding games to the pool as well) and it's a great idea.  I now have about 300 points, which is half of what I'd need to get an available 360 game.

So what's the take-away here?  It's much too early to pick a winner at this point (if either of the current services survives) so you may want to keep your trading conservative until a clear favorite
 emerges.  Getting stuck with unusable trade points is worse than a pocketful of Chuck E. Cheese tokens -- at least you can trade those for a plastic spider.
Tags: goozex, gamershare, xbox, videogame

So after my last post about Mr. Clark's Rails no-nos list (now with extra followup!), I decided to act on Rob Sanheim's suggestion: that a site be created detailing the deprecated parts of Rails and solutions for same.  I first thought of a blog, but I'm lazy and I don't want to write it all.  Deciding that the Official Rails Wiki would be a much better (and easier) repository, I went there and found the perfect page already waiting for me: Deprecated Patterns.  I filled it in, with the requisite bad wikiformatting (can't we all agree on what ' * ' means?).  If you care enough to add an item, please play along with the best practices set forth below:

1. Present a solution along with the problem.
2. Explain why the old way is bad and the new way is better.
3. Keep it simple.
   

The resulting page should provide a ready resource for those who want to play catch up.

Kevin Clark recently posted an interesting article titled "Things You Shouldn't be Doing in Rails."  Some of the suggestions were sorely needed (especially the one about asking good questions on the Rails-talk mailing list), but I thought a few of them were either underdeveloped or plain wrong:

• Scaffolding: I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I believe that the chorus of "don't use the scaffolding" is missing the point.  Even if newbies don't use the scaffolding in their production code, they will use it to learn The Rails Way.  In the absence of well-developed online docs, most users are going to do it the way the scaffold did it -- for better or worse.  I'll pronounce myself fully guilty here (but on the road to recovery).  The payoff from a few hours of cleanup on the scaffold generation code to make it generate clean, idiomatic code is that more people see it done the right way.  Surely that's worth the time taken to accept a few (already made) patches?
  
• Namespaced Controllers: Kevin is on the right track here -- this is one of the first things I wanted to do with my first application.  There's a flawed assumption behind all of this that wasn't mentioned: that you need different controllers for administrators and normal users.  Even though it's a pretty clear violation of the DRY principle, no one seems to mention this when they're talking about this issue.

I'll leave the rest of his points as-is, since they are in fact good suggestions.  It seems that most readers either didn't like the author's tone, or felt that he was "scaring" recent / potential converts away from the Church of Rails.  Maybe that's true, but I think the original idea (presenting a list of deprecated idioms and features in Rails) is certainly a good one.  One commenter proposed a site for that purpose; now that's an idea I could get behind.

I feel like I could just explode!

It's one or two weeks until we close on the new house.  The house we've been waiting on for multiple months.  The house that has no stairs.  The house that DOES have a flat motorcycle-friendly driveway.  Secrecy laws prevent me from actually posting any photos of the house in question.  I can neither confirm nor deny that it looks awesome, and lacks only a yard to bring its curb appeal to full flower.

People have been telling us for some time that "the next part will go really slowly."  I didn't think that was going to happen, as every day seemed to bring a new appliance or coat of paint.  Now, the next week seems like it's going to be a month long.  I am not a patient person by nature, but I've waited this long so I think I can gut it out for another week.  After that, I'll just go sit in front of the house until they let me in.