Admissions of solecism

First, happy New Year everyone! And now, with my first meme post of 2008! Well, mysticalforest was doing it!

102 words

Learn Touch Typing

I used to be up around 120 in high school and had dropped to around 80 a few years ago. I find WPM is largely misleading, since keyboard type and familiarity has a really large effect. Not that this is really important for me, either - WPM doesn't matter too much when programming. (If you do find yourself typing fast while programming, you're probably doing repetitive work, not reusing code, and/or using the wrong language.)

That said, I expected this to be much lower, and around the 80 range. I'm using the new wired Apple Keyboard, which has very quiet low-profile keys. Keyboards with raised keys that have more of a "click" to them tend to be the easiest for me to type on if I'm going for speed, since I don't have to guess if I missed a keystroke. I missed two words on the typing test, and both were due to missing letters. I was also slightly uncomfortable with how it dealt with new sections of text, but the text difficulty balanced that out fairly well.

Took a picture of one of the signs in the parking lot at work. It serves as both a marker of the area I usually park in (“I’m over by the slow children sign!”) and a subject for philosophical pondering.



No one knew where the slow child was running to…

I've been getting MSNBC "news" alerts through MSN Messenger. (And saying that, now feel a strong MSNeed to add MS before all my MSNAcronyms.) One of the things I've been enjoying is their continued blasting of the same headline all throughout the day. Here's my current list of recent alerts since logging in this morning:

msnbc.com Business: Stocks close down on credit woes
msnbc.com Business: Stocks down after strong retail reports
msnbc.com Business: Stocks struggle after strong retail reports
msnbc.com Business: Stocks seesaw after strong retail reports

I'd like to imagine some epic struggle between stockbrokers, but I fear the truth is that someone is pressing buttons a little too quickly and finding out the hard way that taking things back on the Internet is A Hard Thing™. It's not quite as obvious from these, but in past days, it hasn't been uncommon to see the same headlines five times.

Cyclone Sidr has just killed over 3,000 people in Bangladesh and left millions of people homeless. The US has already offered more than $2m in aid for emergency relief and sent in two Navy carriers. At times like these I'm curious to what the major media outlets are headlining on their websites:

CNN: Vick goes to jail -- early
ABC: Did Toy Companies Knowingly Expose Children to Lead? Calif. Says Yes
FOX: 'Til Lotto Jackpot Do Us Part...
NBC: Feds tackle school bus safety rules
NYT: Clinton and Obama Spar Over the Economy
BBC: Aid battle for Bangladesh victims

To be fair to MSNBC, they have a feature world news article about the tragedy right by their headline article. With FOX, I had no idea what their headline was, so I picked the one with the picture. (That's what FOX viewers key into, right?) Most sites don't even have a story about it that's easily noticeable.

They say no news is good news, but I guess that's only true if they'd let you know the bad news in the first place.

I guess media is finally getting a little more hip to this Internet thing. We've gone from horrible pseudo-3D file system interfaces in Jurassic Park to Twitter being referenced on CSI! Crazy, since I doubt many mainstream viewers would recognize that.

People who IMed me during the past week probably knew I was crazy busy at work these past couple weeks. During compiling downtime, I kept myself sane by re-watching old episodes of the show with Ze Frank. Not sure if it was the best choice for sanity, but it still makes me smile. (As a side note and as thanks, draxton_drear gave me my first experience of Ze Frank [which must have been in 2001] by showing me the viral instructional page of How to Dance Properly.) If you haven't seen the show before, check out this entry – supabah, which is one of my favorite standalone episodes.

I did have a lot of downtime this weekend, so I ended up playing lots of Super Mario Galaxy. Truly awesome game. I think I ended up playing more of that than I did of World of Warcraft in the past three weeks combined. It's one of the first games I played that really felt like it had the Wii in mind. Even with less buttons than the N64 controller, it felt like there was more control over the character. (Ice skating, anyone?) I haven't beaten it yet, since I'm trying to clear as much as possible before going through the boss fights, but I imagine I still have quite a few hours of fun left in it.

I also saw Beowulf on Friday. Really not too much to say about it, as my main interest was seeing how well the CGI went over. I knew about the scene where Beowulf fights Grendel. That was what surprised me the most, as there was a lot more man-butt than I was expecting. That might be good for others, but certainly seemed out of place in a movie that didn't seem to go for any X-chromosome appeal; not that the scene had much. (Though, who am I to judge?) There were perhaps 20ish other people in the theater, and the only opinion I could form was that it was okay. Before anyone hates on me for not mentioning Angelina Jolie, if you saw any of the previews, you've pretty much seen all of her in the movie... although they really did dance around that PG-13 rating with her.

Now time for me to start off my short work week!

Most people here know me as a pretty big Halo fanatic, so it's with great disdain that I give the latest installment a "Meh out of 10." In reality, I think the game should be around an 8, but not a 9.5 or a perfect 10 that most sites have been giving it. The franchise itself is pretty difficult to build upon – most of the features lend themselves to be balance changes of the overall multi-player experience. The importance of a strong balanced single-player mode is important for a perfect game, and seeing reviews discredit it as something that doesn't matter seems to be biased reviewing to me.

The X-Box Live experience is what really set Halo 2 out from the rest of the games that had been released at it's time. The matchmaking and networking features were unparalleled. Unfortunately, it isn't quite the case for Halo 3. Halo 3 is one of the first of the next-gen Live games to feature upload features. I believe this will be a hyped feature of XBL when the fall update finally does release. It isn't the first game to do this, though. Skate, an excellent game that also recently came out, has the same kind of features, where you can upload in-game movies and pictures and send webpage URLs of those to your friends.

This feels a lot like games are being "Web 2.0"-ified, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. What is bad is that there's a surcharge for upgrading the number of 'slots' you have to upload to. Companies have gotten creative recently with finding ways to ship you incomplete games where you have to pay to unlock features. It's a shame that a game from Microsoft that is as hyped as Halo 3 was will be reducing themselves to this level. It makes me wonder if Microsoft is testing the waters to see if this will be a viable revenue source for other game companies. Expect to see more paid slots appearing in upcoming games.

As far as multiplayer gameplay, it appears that there's now a large variety of weapons that are more or less exactly the same. There are a few uncommon power weapons that will allow someone to momentarily dominate the map, but for the most part, playing consists of charging into someone and seeing who gets their kill-punch in at the right time. There's no real consequence for continually getting hit by a low to medium powered weapon; you just wait momentarily for your shield to charge back up and barrel back into more close quartered combat. This kind of thoughtless combat has been becoming less appealing to me over time, and that kind of mentality even surfaces in the single player mode cutscenes.

"Why do you always jump out of the ship like that? You know you're going to kill yourself one of these times."

"Because I can, newb. LOL. Roflcopters."

Those aren't exact quotes, but the feeling is there. Speaking of cutscenes, Bungie is dangerously close to falling into the same trap that happened to the Final Fantasy series. They want to tell an immersive story (although one that probably isn't as strong as they think it is) and feel that the best way to do it is through copious amounts of cutscenes that last way too long. Bioshock, while not a strong FPS, is an extremely important game to the genre, because it handles storytelling through your actions and the environment – not through cutscenes.

This is only a fraction of what I've been talking to people about today. (This post is already a little too long.) While I think it is a good game, it's not quite enough to rekindle my interest in the series. It's a shame, 'cause I was hoping it would, and I didn't have my expectations set very high in the first place.

The title is in jest, but it seems like it really was that long ago since I last posted. Incidentally, 'semi-annual' on answers.com suggests: Or did you mean: What should you do if you've been married 24 years and have 4 kids but your wife takes no interest in you or your sex life and you feel rejected every night but she won't talk about it?

Not quite sure what semi-annual has to do with that ... err, scratch that, I don't want to know.

Anyhow, the past few days as of late I've been twitting. mysticalforest already posted his Twitter account, so I'll link to mine. Those that don't already know, Twitter is essentially one-line blogging. It's nice for when you want to post something, but don't feel like writing up a long post.

Last week I joined the iPhone collective. Being a gadget lover who could never find a perfect phone, it's pretty darn close to being one. To me, the biggest downside is that there's still a lot of room for customizability. I'd love to be able to add my own ring-tones. I imagine Apple has it's hands tied there. The recording industry and cellular networks have been supplementing their revenue with overpriced ring-tones for a while. Being in bed with both probably limits their options a lot.

I have been playing around with making wallpapers for my phone, though! I just added a new gallery of wallpapers formatted for the iPhone's screen. Roughly half of the wallpaper is normally covered with text or graphics on the lock screen, so some of them were a bit tricky to get looking decently. Check 'em out!

The announcement of the new CS3 icons definitely shook the design community today. When you take a technical design review to such a predominant artistic suite, you're bound to get mixed reactions. Flickr seems to be the most popular service for annotating what applications belong to each icon. Most people's gut reaction is that it's a mishmash periodic table of Adobe applications. I personally can't figure out what the colors mean, and wish the icons had a little bit more flair.

Having major electrical problems at my apartment since this morning. Only have a couple outlets that work, no more hot water, and no more heat. Very sad now. And very cold.

The hacking community behind the Wii is simply amazing. This post at WiiHacks is a good summary of some of the apps that have come out of the recent breakthroughs with the wiimote. Playing the "guitar" with two wiimotes, navigating Google Earth, transfering Miis off of the wiimote, and more! Some people are even controlling FrontRow with it. People haven't figured out how to parse the data coming back from the nunchuck, but I don't imagine it'll take too long. Something to definitely stay tuned to!