Category: musings

I was out Christmas shopping this afternoon with all the people and the traffic and the hustle and bustle, and it wasn’t all bad.

I do nearly all of my shopping online, and I generally much prefer it.  The selection way later, you don’t have to worry about crowds of people, the ambience is as comfortable as my couch (since it often IS my couch).  You also have access to tons of reviews and other information so you can be pretty sure you’re getting what you want.

There’s another side to that too, though.  Having access to SO MUCH information can make me take so much longer to make my purchase decision that it probably wasn’t actually worth the effort.  It’s sometimes nice to just walk into a store and then walk out 20 minutes later with a working product.  It may not be perfect, but it’ll probably work well enough.  Nothing ever works perfectly no matter how much research you put into it anyway, and I may actually enjoy the thing more when I don’t know everything about it and all of its competitors.  Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss!

When you’re doing Christmas shopping specifically, it’s also really nice to know what gifts you have and which ones you don’t yet have.  There’s no anxious waiting for last minute deliveries and no fear of receiving something other than what you were expecting.  I’m not organized enough to do all of my shopping early enough to avoid those situations altogether, unfortunately.  Also, when I’m out in the crowds of Christmas shoppers is most when I feel that holiday spirit.  The hustle and bustle and the tired enthusiasm and cheer are just a part of the holiday for me.  I’m just a sucker like that!

I’ll still be doing most of my shopping online in the future, but today I was reminded that offline shopping can be nice, too.

I’ve had an iPhone since the first day they came out but I had never used one regularly to listen to music until recently. Overall it’s nice but it’s not all roses.

What I like:
32 gigabytes is enough space to be really useful.

On-the-go Genius mixes are awesome! I thought it was a gimmick when they came out but it works great. I pick a song at semi-random in the morning and have similar music all the way to work and back, and it changes daily.

Listening to that genius mix while reading my day’s RSS feeds on Byline.

The little pop-up iPod control overlay is handy.

And what I don’t like so much:
It’s hard to change the volume by feel. I think I’d be happier if I was using headphones with the integrated controller. I’m going to get a set.

I’d prefer the headphone jack on the bottom so the button would be easier to reach in my pocket. As it is now I find myself having to flip the iPhone over a lot. Maybe I’m dumb, but I find it awkward. This comes up when I want to see what song is playing and the iPhone is in my jacket pocket.

I noticed that my complaints are both about the physicality of the device and not about the software at all. I guess I might prefer the headphone jack on the top when using the device as a phone so maybe it’s just hard to fill both roles.

An interesting change in OS X Snow Leopard is how the installer works. In every previous version of Mac OS X you would boot your computer up using the installer disk and install from it that way. In Snow Leopard that’s not the case anymore. The installer runs directly from the mounted DVD, closes all of your applications and then installs a bunch of files for awhile before rebooting into the installer to finish the job.

That’s interesting because it means the DVD itself is not as central to the process. It is still used in Snow Leopard, but this is a step towards removing that dependency. If the process could be tweaked to boot the system from a specially crafted disk image file, you wouldn’t need the physical media anymore. Operating Systems will certainly be distributed as downloads at some point, but will it be as soon as Mac OS X 10.7?

As a side note, this new install method makes it easy to upgrade a Macbook Air to Snow Leopard. Once you share the DVD from another computer, you’re all set. The Remote Install Mac OS X utility doesn’t have to be running.

Update: I originally thought the install process didn’t boot from the DVD at all, but while doing an update on an iMac I saw that it does indeed! Whoops!

I play video games and I have fun doing it, but I want them to be better.  I find myself getting bored of most games far before I get anywhere near completing them.  I see people talk about games having “a great story”, but I’ve never found any game’s story to be even as interesting as a mediocre movie, let alone a great movie or book.  The story has never been good enough to motivate me to churn through the tedium that every game inevitably throws at you to fill itself out.  I think that’s done by game developers because gamers always complain when a game is too short.  I’ve never found that to be a problem, though… I don’t finish any games, so in my opinion most of them are far too long!

Another problem with games today is ‘sequel-itis’.  Game makers are worse than the worst filmmakers about milking a successful ‘franchise’.  I loved Guitar Hero and played it for hours on end, and then I loved Guitar Hero 2 even more.. but I found myself playing Guitar Hero 3 mostly just to unlock all the songs.  I think Guitar Hero 3 is a superior game to its two predecessors, but the concept is already feeling tired to me.  Rock Band was so popular mostly because it took the next step and added an extra layer of group fun, and the ability to play drums and guitar is definitely pretty great.  Despite that, though, I found myself tiring of the game pretty quickly.  They keep releasing new for-pay songs you can download which should keep the game fresh, but I just find that I never really play it any more.  Rock Band IS a great party game, and playing it with a big group of people is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in front of a television, but it just doesn’t have the same appeal when I’m playing on my own.  The newness is gone, and without that there’s just not enough left to keep me interested.  Grand Theft Auto IV had the same problem for me.  It looked pretty, but I felt like I was just pretty much playing the same game I had burned myself out on several years earlier with Grand Theft Auto III.  Give me something new!

Here’s what I think would make games more fun for me…  Game studios should bring in the same level of writing talent as they do programming, design, voice, and graphics talent, and they should release games in smaller, lower-cost (both for them and for us), episode-like chunks.  The very best game developers should still be making full-length games of very high quality, but most game developers do not fall into that category.  Most game developers are really making TV-quality content while they’re trying to convince us it’s high-class film-quality content.  Game studios should also stop killing their best ideas by sequeling them to death.  That probably makes more money in the short-term but it’s just turning off many would-be gamers and ultimately restricting the development of the audience for the game industry.

I know I’m not the only one thinking this, and I think there’s already a movement towards my suggestions (as if anyone in the game industry really cares what I think, haha) so hope is not lost!  The smaller, cheaper, downloadable games on the Xbox Live Arcade, the Playstation 3, and more recently the Wii are breathing new life into gaming.  The games are not all great (few of them are, actually), but they’re small enough in scope that a lot of new ideas are being put into them and some of them are worth paying for just for that.  The episodic concept is being put to the test with games like the Penny Arcade one, too.  I still didn’t finish that one, but I think I got probably 3/4 the way through it, which is something for me!

I bet the people making the games don’t really care too much about what I have to think, but I feel better to have that off my chest anyway.

I want a personal audio cloud so I can have music surrounding me all the time.  People within 3 feet of me would also hear the music so we could listen together.  It wouldn’t emanate from me, but would just be around me in this cloud so my companions would hear it as the same volume as I do.  People farther away would not hear it at all so it wouldn’t bother them.  It would also have an option to let other people relay the cloud so anyone within 3 feet of them would also hear it.  That way a larger group of people could all hear the same music.  This would be awesome for things like bike riding in the city where you don’t want to wear headphones that obstruct your hearing.  It would also be awesome for hiking.