but maybe TrimSpa's not so good for the ol' noggin. Or maybe it was just booze. Either way, we've got a new chapter in the big book of Awards-Show Meltdowns.

ohhh I'mabadperson...

is this one, which Brian and I came up with while riding back from the UVA game last weekend. Route 29 has got a lot of stoplights, and at highway speeds it's tough to tell when you ought to stop for a yellow light and when you ought to keep going. The problem seems likely to come to a head as red light cameras are rolled out.

The image above expresses the basic idea. The yellow light now has multiple states, counting down from a full light to whatever minimally-thick donut-shape is safely visible (better to go from full-to-donut than full-to-point to prevent problems with depth perception at night). This is all possible since incandescent traffic lights are rapidly being replaced with LED lights. All it would take is the addition of a cheap timing circuit -- I don't know much about circuit design, but with a morning on the internet and an afternoon at Radio Shack I'm pretty sure I could whip one of these up.

I'll admit that this might seem kind of silly. The yellow light is already a transitional warning -- do we need warnings about its transition as well? Reductio ad absurdum, etc. But the yellow light interval isn't standardized -- this would give drivers an immediate, intuitive sense of how long a yellow will last. The traffic light system wasn't designed for modern highway speeds, and the cost to implement this would be minimal. Making sure folks know what the hell it means before they get on the road might take a little effort, but I bet some warning signs could handle the job.

I swear. I just haven't gotten around to writing about it. But thanks to Jeff, here's some photographic evidence.

I do intend to write up the trip before I completely forget it, but my next blog opus is a gigantic post I've been writing that combines more BitTorrent pedagogy with some bullshit philosophizing, in which I make an ill-advised attempt to draw parallels between hacker sociology and the thermodynamic laws of physics. I know you're all excited.

Ut oh. It looks like Microsoft is banning users from XBox Live when they connect with a modchip -- even if the modchip is disabled.

A brief explanation: installing a modchip in your XBox turns off Microsoft's copy protections. This lets you do all kinds of neat stuff, from making, uh, "backups" of retail games to emulating your old NES favorites to playing downloaded movies on your TV. It's a handy thing to have.

As you might expect, the "backup" thing -- more commonly referred to as "piracy" -- doesn't sit well with Microsoft. MS takes a loss of between $25 and $100 on each XBox sold, so they're also not nuts about people buying XBoxes for legal purposes that don't involve buying MS games. Consequently, it's always been the case when you connect to their online gaming service (XBox Live) that active modchips will be detected and modded systems banned. Each XBox has a chip inside -- called an EEPROM -- that contains a unique identifier. This is what gets banned. Once you've been banned the only fix is to somehow get your hands on a new EEPROM and install it. It's a pain.

The modchip people solved this simply enough by putting external power switches on their chips, allowing them to be easily disabled prior to going onto XBox Live. This worked fine. You had to own a legal copy of your games in order to play them on XBox Live, but with the flip of a switch you could still fire up Super Mario 3. Fair enough. The nerds were soothed, and the world spared their terrible fury (e.g. irate newsgroup posts).

But the order has been disturbed! Microsoft can force users to download new XBox Live software whenever they'd like, and the latest round of updates seem to have included some new anti-modchip features. People are getting banned with their chips off, and no one's sure why -- there's a lot of confusion. The mod community has put together a survey that should help identify the real algorithm being used to ban, but results aren't yet publicly available. So for now we're stuck with a lot of wild speculation. The most popular theories:

scanning hard drives for game backups

Folks with backups aren't getting banned consistently, so the verdict seems to be that this isn't the problem.

detecting non-stock hard drive models

The XBox hard drive is only 8 gigs, so nearly everyone installs a bigger one as soon as they mod their XBox. But again, this isn't happening consistently, and there are some technical reasons to think that this may not be possible for MS to do in a rigorous way.

scanning the LPC bus for modchips

Some users are reporting that their modchip status light is changing colors briefly prior to getting banned -- this would certainly imply that MS has installed a program that pokes around the system for hardware that shouldn't be present. Modchips have become ridiculously over-engineered, so it's not inconceivable that some would have a detectable presence even when they're nominally "off". If this really is happening, it likely only applies to some modchips -- perhaps only the newer models. It's too early to say.

the "marriage" theory

This is the favored explanation at the moment -- the thinking is that when you first log into XBox Live the service records your EEPROM ID and pairs it with your hard drive's serial number. If you connect to XBL in the future and have a new hard drive, MS knows you've cracked open your XBox, voided your warranty, and most likely hate America. Bad consumer! If your XBox was already modded the first time you got onto XBox Live, you're probably okay.

So that's where things stand. For my part, I've been playing Halo 2 online all weekend with Charles, Scott, Kriston and Yglesias -- so far, without any problems. I've got an older modchip (Xecuter 2.3b lite) and only signed onto XBox Live after the modchip. Maybe I'm safe, or maybe I've just been lucky. I'll keep you posted.

(Miles apart, I can still tell that Catherine is rolling her eyes.)