Sep 24, 2008

Auto lust is in the air, and it seems to be spreading.

Could this car get me to buy American again?  Just maybe.  Its a technophile’s playground.

Now, don’t get on my case about NOT buying American.  These days, my US assembled ULEV Honda is more of an American car than your average Mexican built Chrysler.  And, I’ve more than paid my dues with my other car, a 10 year old Cadillac SLS.  Its the second Caddy I’ve owned, after the first one died on me in roughly a year.  Never again!  Should have thought of that before getting my current one!  Ha!

The biggest question with the Lincoln is, will I fit in it?  Well, OK - that’s probably second to will I ever be a non-cheapo and actually buy it?  Probably not.

*SIGH*  Being fiscally responsible really sucks.

Lincoln MKS, Techno Car

Sep 12, 2008

SNIFF.  If only this were a joke…

Funny, Web Dev, Software Development

Sep 11, 2008

My brother wrote a very poignant post about 9/11 and the many repercussions of that day.

I started a comment that ballooned into a novel - I know, big surprise with me, right?  :)

Anyway, I wanted to post my comment here as it gets to a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about lately, and what else is a blog for other than that?

One of things that has been bothering me lately is my deep political disagreement with people that I greatly respect on a day to day basis.  This post about 9/11 finally allowed me the mental and emotional process to begin to articulate my position and support it with something other than just political haranguing.

Anyway, here’s my thoughts.  They will probably make more sense if you’ve read my brother’s post first.

CLAP CLAP CLAP…

I remember that morning, and how three months earlier I had taken AA Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles as I had done MANY times before.

I remember having a meeting in the towers 8 months prior to that.

I remember thinking that what Israel has had to deal with on a daily basis has finally come here. The big question was - was it going to stay?

People can argue all they want about Iraq and what the Bush administration has done. His leadership, and the war that his Administration has waged seems to be a lot of what makes people NOT proud to be an American.

How unfair. The fact of the matter is that we haven’t been attacked here since. Why? Because they are focused on attacking us there, and have vowed to focus all resources on expelling us. Call me callous, but I’d rather have al qaeda focused on our military instead of our malls and restaurants. For that reason alone, I hope its a very long time before we are totally out of Iraq. People here are “sick of the war”. How the hell do they think the Iraqis feel? We are so damn pampered.

I’ll tell you - I’m proud to be an American, but I’m frustrated with how shallow we can be as a nation. The country is poised to choose a man who, if elected, will be the least qualified person to ever hold the office of President. I’m not talking race, religion or even politics - just strict proven capability. Why? Because he sounds good. To me, that’s shallow. I don’t care if a person is black, white, brown, yellow, male, female - I want a President that will strengthen our country and make sure that my family is protected. Why? Because I REMEMBER 9/11 and it still scares the crap out of me. Mr. Obama may one day have done enough to prove that he is up to the job, but I don’t think that day is here today.

Many in this country want CHANGE because they are unhappy with how things are today. Maybe they should look back to the year after 9/11 and realize how bad it COULD be. These are the same people who said we went to war in Iraq because of oil. I guess they somehow missed me when the free tank of gas was given out? Did you get yours?

How bad would our economy be with suicide bombers hitting our malls during the Christmas shopping season? How bad would our jobless rate be if companies were too afraid to innovate and bring new products to market because the population at large is scared out of its mind? Nobody buys anything at times like that… How bad would it be for Los Angeles if the entertainment industry was again paralyzed by rampant uncertainty? How bad would the dollar be world-wide if our country was in the throws of real economic chaos, not just a downturn in growth?

We whine for change, why? Because the foam on the latte of our American lives has somehow been deflated? We should be thankful a hole hasn’t been punched in the cup.

Change is good if its toward something better. Better is always different, but different isn’t always better.

How many attacks will it take to bring out in our people the backbone of iron that you can see in places like Tel Aviv? Honestly, I hope we never have to find out… America largely doesn’t “remember” 9/11. We recall it. We recall it as what is hopefully the worst attack we will ever witness - and that from afar, for most of us.

I can tell you one thing - I’m sure John McCain doesn’t recall it that way. No, it’s not the worst thing that he’s ever seen. Not by a mile. I’d much rather go with a man who has clearly proven the quality of HIS backbone, thank you very much. I’m not even fond of his politics much, but I’m confidant of who he is and what he can do.

I’m proud to be an American because of the heritage of people like that.

Sep 07, 2008

Sweet! Gamespot has put up a video walking through the Xbox 360, the PS3 and the Wii versions of The Force Unleashed.

The Wii version isn’t nearly as good graphics wise as the other two, but that is to be expected.  To compensate, you get some other cool features, like Lightsaber Duels and extra levels.  Neat stuff!

Games, The Force Unleashed

Sep 04, 2008

Sep 02, 2008

I won’t take a bunch of time telling you what Google Chrome is about.  Rather, I’ll give you a quick bullet list of neat features and let you go out on your own and get the details.

• Its fast.  VERY fast.
• It has crash control - one tab won’t crash the whole thing.
• Tabs can be ripped off to their own window or merged back into the bar.
• Incognito mode - a “no record” type of web browsing, which is great for accessing sensitive or confidential information on shared resources (think web banking at work, web mail at a conference, accessing your company’s CRM system at one of those public PC’s at an airport, etc.)
• Application shortcuts to make web apps feel more like desktop apps
• A minimal interface so that the content is the focus, not the browser
• and more.

Its still a beta version and has a few issues - for instance, while writing this post, the entire browser crashed, not just one tab.  So much for crash control! To be fair, it wasn’t my web app that crashed. It was the browser itself - so, crash control on tabs wasn’t supposed to solve that kind of thing.  Again, its a beta.  As such, it is very promising.

My overall feeling about it - WOW, is that fast.  Every page seems to load 20-50% faster anecdotally than anything in FF or IE, and the minimal interface is really nice (a bit similar to full screen tabbed browsing, but that’s OK).

I have a few concerns too:

• How long will they actually continue developing it?
• Spell checking doesn’t seem to be integrated yet - I LOVE integrated spell check in FF
• There is no plug-in mechanism yet (AFAIK…)
• Will this derail Google’s long time support of FF?  They did just renew their commitment to it, but is another browser really necessary?  I love FF and wish they would have simply worked with that initiative to improve FF to be everything that they wanted to achieve with Chrome.
• Google has its own agenda (ad revenue), and sometimes things seem out of touch with that goal.  With FF as a non-affiliated browser, why the need for Chrome?  They give some answers, but none that ring true enough to warrant a separate branch from FF, in my opinion.  It makes me wonder what evil plans they have lurking in the wings.  To be certain, Google has long been the Jedi to Microsoft’s Sith, but (in my best Yoda voice) - “The Chosen One, Google may be. Still, too clouded its future is.”  Google has been trying to become a viable and complete computing platform, hoping to drive Microsoft out of its stranglehold on PC computing.  But, once it is successful, what evil things will it start to commit? Some would say the evil has already started…  To borrow a line from The Dark Knight - will they be the hero long enough to see themselves become the villain?

Only time will tell.

But, if they clean up a few of the gaps that currently exist as compared to FireFox, Chrome may actually be an extremely viable third option.  After all, its from Google.  They usually don’t make things that suck.

Chrome, Google, Google Chrome

Sep 02, 2008

“A team of Japanese researchers are looking at the next step in immersive gaming, and it just may be ultrasound. The technology adds a sense of tactile feedback to games, without the use of gloves or other devices.” from Gearlog

Wow, now THAT would be cool.  Though, would I really want to actually feel all those sword slashes, bullet wounds and tactical nuclear strikes on my person?  Hmm… Maybe I need to rethink this…  :)

Actually, this reminds me of a PC peripheral that was described roughly 10 years ago - it was a scent generator that was hooked up to your PC and that sat on top of your monitor.  It could generated about 10 different scents and they were working on more.  The idea was that since the sense of smell is the one most closely tied to memory, that it would be an excellent sensory immersion mechanism.  It never really went anywhere, as far as I can tell - maybe it had to do with the fact that people don’t really want to know what hordes of rotting zombies being burned to bits smells like.  *shrug*  Just a thought.  :)

Games, Ultrasound, Immersive Gaming