later nerdz; it’s about techgnarlogy

See?

Yelp is really cool. I found my first SF sushi restaurant, Sushi Zone, on Yelp.

Last night I went to another restaurant which I had been to before. The place had essentially found it’s mojo for me. It went from average to my new favorite.

The food was great, the environment and clientel were fitting, and the service was friendly like they were strangers having a party and wanted me to join them.

This is where Yelp comes in. I don’t want to yelp this place. I don’t want it to become popular. I don’t want people to come there for the first time. I realized, for the first time, why many of my elder foodie friends don’t use Yelp.

There is a very important layer to information disemination that Yelp doesn’t acknowledge. That layer is what I experienced last night. I would have shared this place with my close friends, in fact I will share it, I can’t wait to. But it won’t be by posting a review, or putting it into a bucket on my internet-public profile. No offense public, I think you’re great, but there are a lot of things that you have to find for yourself.

I gotta say that beyond the weird hang up the first time I installed this app,it now performs perfectly! All of the simplicity I have come to expect from the iPhone is here in sweet wordpress fuctionality. Now if they could make the keyboard landscape I would be in love.

Is the road to true digital immersion paved with incremental simulation?

this is interesting:

http://home.novint.com/products/novint_falcon.php

http://gear.ign.com/articles/833/833067p1.html

but still, nothing’s quite so direct:

NWS: http://www.ascensionsuspension.com/extreme/images/rotisserrie%20(1)_jpg.jpg

The price is lowered but the increase in monthly fees equals more!

Sticking with Helio and waiting for a GPhone!

Also: Mobile.me is nothing new. BORING.

Testing out this new Yahoo Media player.

This is awesome, now my blog can have a playlist. SICK BROE.

Some nice metal:
Behemoth - Towards Babylon

And some awesome electronic music:
Cicada - Earth’s Assault

For Obamarama:
Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours

Wow. What a week.

Went home for family thursday morning red-eye. Spent Thursday to Sunday in Ohio. Get back in to the office Monday and, surprise, I’m going to San Diego for work. I’m the one-man-show on the ground. One day, maximum productivity. 6AM fly to San Diego, work full-speed with a team of programmers and HCI people. After one delayed flight that evening, arrive home. Sleep like a rock.

Oh yeah, also last week I launched my TF2 website (http://www.tf2base.com), server (The Satyricon, http://steamcommunity.com/groups/satyricon) and organized two clan matches for my TF2 clan (The Green Panthers, http://steamcommunity.com/groups/greenpanthers).

Team Fortress 2 is AMAZING but I have only been able to play lately by severely neglecting other parts of my life. I can’t wait to return to a sustainable lifestyle.

and it hasn’t even been released yet.

I’ve been reading forums, watching videos, researching how to run a server, playing TFC and HL2. I am psyched for TF2!

The back story is: Team Fortress was a mod for Quake (yeah, the original quake) in 1996. Around this time I was just getting angry enough with playing Descent online. I think my joystick broke or something. Anyway, I got Quake for christmas and instantly was pulled into the online community. Team Fortress was awesome and I eventually joined a clan which I’m still a member of called the Green Panthers. We played for about 3-4 years until Team Fortress kind of fizzled out.

The reason for the fizzle was that TF2 was slated for development on the Quake 2 engine. A lot of new games started being released and people left the bustling TF community for smaller scenes. Half-Life, Quake2Action, Counter-Strike and eventually TFC put the nail in the TF2-coffin. TFC was a terrible remake of Team Fortress called “Team Fortress Classic”. There was nothing classic about it, the player physics were horrible, the game play was completely different and it was full of kids playing. So I never played TFC because it’s an abomination of the game.

Now, almost 7 years later, TF2 is finally going to be released. This Monday the beta begins, which you can participate in by pre-ordering the Orange box game bundle which includes HL2, HL2: Lost Coast, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Portals, Team Fortress 2 and Peggle Extreme. All that for $45 and you get to play on a wonderful monday TF2 game.

I have almost completely ruled out team-based league play like the days of old. I used to play competitively and join leagues, enter tournaments and compete on ladders. I just don’t have the time for that anymore, or at least neither do my clanmates. We all have wives and kids now. The plus side to this is we also have job experience and money now and I am planning on spending some of both on attempting to monetize a game server that I will host. I’ve been researching dedicated, VPS and shared hosting for a TF2 game server as well as judging the general tone of the community so far. The idea is, I’ll be able to host a server and a bustling web-community just like the days of yore. I’ll be an enabler for all those 16 year old shitheads who won’t come to family dinner because they have a match.

Apple sold 1 million iPhones and I’ve heard they are looking to buy spectrum. Apple party. We are party machines.

Sony’s Rolly looks like one of us. It’s actually an MP3 player that dances and lights up to the music. If it could drunk dial it would be complete.

Work is busy. Don’t ask me for more than wonderful youtube links.

I’m waiting. I hope you can understand, it’s nothing against you. I think you’re great! Every time I see you, I want to touch you as if you were my own, but I have to wait.

You’re a really great device, but, you’re missing some things. I’m willing to work around that. We can work around that when the time is right. It’s just, your parents are asking for too much, I can’t afford what they want for you. I can’t give that to you yet. Right now I can’t give you what you need. But I’m confident in one more year I’ll be ready and things will be great. I mean, things are moving in a great direction and soon, everything will be ready.

In one more year my divorce with the Helio Ocean will be legal and I won’t have to pay any fines. Then we can be joined in contract and things can be right. I won’t have to go behind your parent’s backs and hack you on to another network. Hell, your parent’s can even give us cable television and internet! Eventually, I want it all.

All good things come to those who wait.

I just read that Palm has closed the idea of Palm Foleo. I don’t know the entire story around this device but it seemed to be filling a particularly empty void in the mobile market. I guess I just couldn’t see myself using this with my phone instead of wi-fi. Why not just release an ultra-slim sub-$200 device with a full qwerty that connects to wifi and can do the basics? Why not a OLPC laptop for business that doesn’t look like kermit the frogs laptop?

I hope everyone had a great labor day. Gotta show the man who’s boss, right? TAKE THAT, insatiable machine! Me personally, I love to work.

I spent my weekend hanging with friends and working on World of Warcraft. That game never gets old and is slowly capturing the few friends of mine who have held off the onslaught. I’m starting a new character with my friend and this time around, I’m actually doing my skills. Fishing, herb gatherin… hell yea, braaeehh.

I also worked on a great meal. My first time making linguine ai frutti di mare. Seafood is great. Long live epicurious.

Burning Man is over and the hordes of spiritualized are returning to the office from the dusted plane. Even though this is the second year I haven’t attended burning man, I feel like I can’t escape it. Enjoy, dear readers, attempting to get actionable communication from them in your meetings today. KFC’s new advertising plan is to ship chicken-smelling packages to office mail-carts near you. “Maybe the sweet sweet scent of KFC in the air will bring burners back to the dollar.” Fuck no, man. “The Burn” totally, like, changed me.

You’ve Changed.

Anyone planning on attending the Mobile 2.0 Conference in San Francisco Oct 15th? Looks pretty gnar for $145 you get to see speakers, eat food and drink drinks. I’m hella down. Hopefully, in the name of Saint Labor’s Labor Day, I can get it expensed. I’ll be looking for ideas for persuading my decidedly anti-open client into using their powers for good and not evil. Wish me luck… or give me advice.

Hooray for work. Get back to it.

This list of iPhone disappointments continues to be posted to forums. One such forum post grabbed front page on digg. Here are some key points. Click “read more” for a link to the full list.

1. Bluetooth is ONLY good for connecting a headset. That’s it.

2. There is no file browser on the device at all. Data must be organized (if at all) in the appropriate application.

3. The camera is a simple application that has ONE button: the shutter. Pictures come out okay on the device, but nothing too fancy on a monitor, especially if it was an attempt at a macro shot.

5. Web browser is slow, even over WLAN. Even the simple OneList web app that was created takes around 20 seconds to load over WLAN. You can not highlight, cut, copy, or paste and text from a website, and you can not save any images you find from a website either. The only nice thing about it is the tabbed browsing, which crashed on me when I went to Engadget and YouTube on two tabs. This is the only application that allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode.

6. The keyboard sucks. It gets slightly better after the iPhone “learns” you, as the employees said, but even then, it’s not a device you can use with one hand comfortably, much less without looking.

10. The only form of customization outside of a lame default ringtone is the wallpaper, which you’ll only see when you need to unlock the device or when you get a phone call.

11. “Picture pinching” or using two fingers to zoom on any content is certainly fun to play with, but not practical whatsoever. This operation depends solely on using the device with two hands.

12. No document editor or native viewer. You can not store documents on the device to be viewed, they can only be viewed as attachments when they’re sent to your in an email.

13. Visual voicemail is laggy and reacts about the same way as pushing the fast forward and rewind buttons on traditional voicemail systems. The only advantage is for those that get that many voicemail messages a day that they need to sort them according to priority.

14. No games.
15. No voice dialing.
16. No speed dialing (which can be made up by the “quick list”, but getting to that quick list isn’t as fast as holding a single key on a real keypad).
17. No video.
18. No MMS.


read more | digg story

Sony has revealed at GDC their PlayStation Home network play platform similar to Xbox Live. The platform will allow users to invite to games, befriend and chat with other networked users, among other things. The main feature is it’s Second Life-esque, third-person interface.

This may be what Sony needs to spark the PlayStation 3 to mark it’s small territory in the mainstream.

read more | digg story