Since I just posted about the Corrado, and I sometimes get asked about my fondness for cars, I thought I’d take the liberty of linking to an article from Esquire magazine that just about sums it up for me:
The Conversion of an Apathetic Driver
Any questions?
(OK, that’s a picture of the R8 — because really who are we kidding?)
After more than 20 years as an Apple user, and well over a decade as an investor, it’s articles like this one that have me considering dumping my stock:
5 reasons to buy Apple stock again
Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mainstream this pro-Apple. Either they’re poised to take over the industry, or it’s all going to go sideways quick.
I’m a bit odd when it comes to car repair. I like to get my hands dirty, but I’m not really reliable enough to accomplish all the work I need to do on the cars. The result is that my Corrado is constantly in need of some attention, and recently that attention is almost exclusively dealing with drained car batteries. Somewhere a previous owner has spliced in an accessory that’s draining the car’s battery, but I haven’t taken the time to track it down. In the mean time, I’ve gone through 2 Optima car batteries and spent too much time and money keeping the batteries charged.
I took Anne’s advice (after much hand-wringing trying to get Virtual Pinmame working), and purchased Williams Pinball Hall of Fame (for the XBox 360). Mostly, I got this one (as opposed to the Gottlieb version) because it has two of my all time favorite pinball machine in it: Funhouse and Medieval Madness.
I have to say it’s a pretty good representation of playing on the full machines — although I often want better camera angles to choose from. My mad skillz at Funhouse seem to have translated over, and my high score on the actual machine seems pretty close to my current high score in the video game. I’m not sure, but playing the video game might constitute a decent form of practice for real pinball.
I finally got a refund from 1-800-flowers. 23 days after this all started, I can close the book on this mess.
For the record, don’t bother talking with them on the phone. Just go straight to the online customer support (who could have guessed).
Ubisoft has perfected a simple 4-step method for turning gamers into software pirates:
1. Release a new game with invasive DRM
2. Wait 24 hours for the obligatory cracked versions (or not)
3. Have the required DRM servers crash
4. PROFIT!!!
Seriously, how could they not have expected this… I’m guessing that the DRM authentication servers are vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Whether this outage is the result of a coordinated attack or not, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see one in the future.
Apple is about to release the iPad (April 3, 2010), and while I don’t know if it’s going to be a huge success, I think they’ve figured out some problems that others are still struggling with. For instance, I just had a look at Gizmodo’s coverage of the “Microsoft Courier” (what a new font, really?). Ok, it’s a prototype tablet computer — and it’s a failure. At least, it will be if it ships in the form that Gizmodo presents. I think it solves next to no problems, but is extremely limited compared it’s competition that it can’t succeed. I could compare it to the iPad, but I’m pretty sure that’s not even a fair fight. No it’s real competition are netbooks, and they’re so much nicer it’s not even funny.
To really understand my point, have a look at the galleries for each device. The iPad’s is here, and the Courier can be seen here. See any differences?
A little Photoshop wizardry (courtesy of an online tutorial), and I’ve upgraded the bubbles in my first iPhone application. I need to figure out a real game of some sort to use these in so I can justify putting it on the App Store.
I’m still tinkering, but I pretty much just finished my first iPhone app that’s more interesting than a list of text. As I mentioned before, I’m taking the iPhone class at UMD this semester; and this is/was lab #3. Basically it’s just a small app that creates bubbles as you tap the screen, and pops them if you tap the bubble. The project specification is online here.
I’ve added a few additional features: “pop” sound and vibration, custom bubbles, multiple bubble sizes and additional colors, application icon, about screen, and removing the status and icon bars while bubbles are on screen. It’s probably not worth $0.99 (and I can’t publish to the App Store even if I wanted to), but at least one of the kids likes it. Mostly, I’m jazzed to have created something that works on the phone. Here are some screenshots (so you can see what you aren’t missing).
Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse Now, Snotorious B.I.G. call it what you will, the blizzard of 2010 was pretty miserable for us.
If you don’t follow my Twitter Feed/Facebook Wall, you might not know that last week’s snow storm was pretty traumatic for the family. Besides 55″ of snow, we had a town truck catch fire in front of our house, blocking us in (that’s my car just ahead of the truck.
Being trapped in the house wouldn’t have been so bad, except that our power went out about 30 minutes after truck got stuck. We were without power and heat for 32 hours, and it took Kim heating up the phones to get the plow moved in only 25 hours. While being stuck in the house for 1 day doesn’t sound so bad, the house was cold enough that we could see our breath (about 50 degrees). We all bundled up and the kids toughed it out; joining us in our bed for warmth overnight.
The big effort went on towards the end of the outage where we heated aquarium water on the stovetop and manually cycled water in all 5 (condensed from 6) fish tanks. At the onset the tanks were all around 55º, and we had to keep heating water and adding back to the tanks until they got into the 70º range. I think we saved all of the fish, but we might have lost my red cherry shrimp (at least I haven’t seen them since).
a 38 year-old perpetual student, occasional photographer, and unabashed geek; living in Washington D.C.
My opinions are always free, but you get what you pay for.