Georgia Pok Guy

I think, if anything, today’s xkcd sold me against getting a DROID.  Why is a physical keyboard a selling point?  I really like Apple’s decision to make all but the most basic buttons virtual.  It allows the phone to maintain the same form factor, and with fewer moving parts that’s just one less thing I have to worry about breaking.  Granted, Android is an open source platform, which is good from the developer side of things.  And running multiple apps at the same time would be nice (or even just having multiple web pages loading at the same time).  But for some reason I just can’t look past the physical keyboard.  It seems like a red flag of lazy design, so who knows what other horrors may await?  In the end, I’ll wait to see what the early adopters think before casting a final judgement.  Part of the reason I’ve been looking at the DROID is that my Gen 1 iPhone is getting kinda old.  But since there is little price difference between the DROID and new iPhones, I’m more inclined to stick with Apple.

Migration projects, regardless of the number of exclamation points you put, are never exciting.

As the two (three?) people who read this blog know, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that limits posts to 140 characters.  This character limitation encourages conciseness on the part of the writer, creating snapshots of their day-to-day life.  Now, in the spirit of the idea that nothing is sacred, I want to take the beautiful idea of Twitter and explode it.  I present to you Twitter Obfuscation, a game you can play where the goal is to be as verbose as possible in only 140 characters.  A contestant begins with 140 points.  One point is subtracted for each character under 140 used (and, no, you can’t just pad your entry with spaces).  Another 40 points will be subtracted for actually making a point.  Each word over eight letters long adds two points to the total, and any words over twelve letters long add five points.  So break out your cellphone and dictionary, and challenge your friends to a game of Twitter Obfuscation!

I am not entirely sure what the hell is going on.  Ever since I started using Google Reader I have noticed Safari chomping up the processor like it was Big League Chew.  I can’t tell if this is because of Google Reader itself, or the fact that my having Google Reader invariably leads to me opening up a bazillion tabs of all the news articles I want to read but never get around to.  Honestly having gobs of tabs opened never seemed like a big deal in the past.  But I can’t imagine Google Reader itself just sitting there, quietly updating every once in a while, crashing my poor MacBook.  I suppose I could use Firefox, but I love Safari’s tab switching keyboard shortcut.  This is, how the kids would say, “not cool.”  Maybe if I wasn’t a wannabe news junkie and actually read the articles as they came up I wouldn’t have this problem?  But I still don’t see why it’s a problem in the first place.  Grrr.

Sometimes I wish I could write individual methods (functions, however you like it) in any programming language I liked, and then just throw them all into one file and have them magically work.  For instance, I wrote 24 lines of Java code today to process a string in just the right way.  Then, just because I thought it would be a fun exercise, I wrote the same thing in Perl in 4 lines of code.  le sigh…  Of course, I suppose I could have written it all in one line of code, but who wants to maintain that?

Microsoft’s MSN division in China recently announced the completion of a new robot to field customer service related questions (as if the automated customer service phone systems weren’t bad enough).  All I can say is, you’d think that a nation with over a billion people wouldn’t be suffering from the kind of labor shortage that would justify building robots to answer mundane questions.  I mean, sure, who doesn’t love a cute little robot with cute little pigtails dressed in a cute little cheongsam that responds to the moniker “Xiao Mei” (which I’m assuming is written as 小美)?  My guess is you could find some country girl from Gansu, train her in the subtle art of customer service, and still be paying less money.  But I suppose helping to lift her family out of poverty isn’t as glitzy as a bunch of robots running around downtown Beijing during the Olympics…

My one major gripe with Wordpress themes is that they never work straight out of the box (metaphorically, of course, this one came in a tarball).  The one I am currently using needed a number of additions to get it up to the functional standards of the default Kubrick.  And so, with my thoughts returning to web programming and the glory days of りんご, I am seriously considering just making one myself.  I just noticed that the page links I added to the top are missing when I view my blog using Safari, and frankly that is just unacceptable.  Of course, it doesn’t help that web browsers present HTML in a Rashomon fashion, but I figure if I’m the one behind the source code I’ll know what I would need to fix, and also know that the code is written in a robust fashion, unlike most of the garbage I encounter.  That’s right.  I’m callin’ all y’all computer programmers out!  You been served, son!  (Or whatever.  I never saw that movie.)

Obviously slighting me once was not enough.  Not only did Nintendo have to release the DS lite a month after I bought the ol’ clunker, but now this.  The most bad ass DS known to man.  That’s right, Nintendo has released a new golden DS, branded with the Triforce, in conjunction with their new Zelda game.  Grrr…  I’m not made of money, you know!

Lets say you’re sitting in your local Starbooks, all by your lonesome, and you’re just dying to converse with someone about the Japanese serow.  Do you:

1.  Stand up and shout out that the Japanese serow is an even toed ungulate?
2. Use iFob to see if anyone else has listed “Rare fauna of East Asia” under their interests?

iFob is a really cool (in theory, haven’t used it myself) piece of software for your iPhone that connects you to everyone on your local wireless network, allowing you to exchange information about yourself.  It’s like MySpace or Facebook at WLAN granularity.  For introverted people constantly living in fear of being rejected by others (such as myself), this sounds like a great piece of software.  I can see who around me shares my interests, and can use that to strike up a conversation.  Finding a kindred spirit is always an uplifting experience.

One potential downside I could see, especially for the womenfolk, is having creepy guys pretending to share your interests.  This problem already exists in places like MySpace, only this time the guy is in the same room as you.  Still, I think this looks like a really interesting, innovative idea, and I look forward to testing it out sometime.  Now, if only I liked coffee… 

On this day in 1984, Apple released their first personal computer.  It came with an 8 MHz processor and 128 KB of RAM, all for the modest sum of $2495.  I’m sure Arjun can attest that Apple has come a long way in the past 24 years…

My family had a Macintosh way back in the 80’s, but I don’t think it was the Macintosh 128K.  I have some fond memories of playing around with it on the ol’ library table in the family room.  My favorite program was a painting program (which naturally appealed to my artistic side; I lament that Apples after the late 90’s don’t include this program).  So I suppose it was only natural for me to return to Apple at the behest of a crazy Indian-Omani back in 2002, after falling under the influence of M$.  Unfortunately my father, who was a big Mac fan, buying them up until 1997, doesn’t have one currently.  Maybe the fact that all of his sons have Apples will sway him to buy another one to sit on the office desk in the villa familia…