Bang on door first, ask questions later

Me: "What's going on?"

1 (banging on door): "He's been passed out in there for eleven hours."

Me: "Are you sure he's in there?"

2: "Well, his door's locked..."

Me: "...So?"

3: "If he'd left I would have seen him. I've been up since 10:45."

1: "Try calling him"

2 (on the phone): "Hey, where are you?" (pause) "In the lobby?"

Preemptive Photography

It's thinking about raining here in Cleveland (and it already has, a little), and whenever that happens the sky usually has some interesting things going on in terms of lighting.

Unrelatedly (but not for long), I used to take my camera around with me pretty much wherever I went, but then I stopped since it was slightly inconvenient. This is sort of like how I used to use Time Machine but then stopped because it was slightly unnecessary, and then my hard drive died.

So this morning on the way to work, as I drove west, the darker clouds started thinning out and as I rounded a bend in I-90 a relatively solid line separated a pretty dark cloud from a very bright blue. The surrounding scenery also seemed pretty nice, and there was a lot of light highlighting some green on some sort of tree-like object and red on a rusty bridge. As "dangerous" as grabbing my camera and haphazardly taking pictures while pointing it in the general vicinity of the horizon may have been, I wish I had it with me at the time....

The title of this post doesn't accurately describe that situation, but both words in it are applicable.

iPhone App Update

I've ditched Aurora Feint, Morocco, Yelp, and Banner, and am on the verge of deleting To Do, but I keep holding out hope that it will be improved. Aurora Feint has been getting very positive reviews, and I agree that it has impressive graphics for a free game, but the gameplay is extremely repetitive and boring. It's worse than Bejeweled.

Cube Runner is back in the App Store, and it's really fun. Also, Moonlight Mahjong Lite (which, unfortunately, shows up as "Moonli...Lite" on the home screen) is a very good Mahjong game, with impressive graphics and intuitive controls. The "Lite" version only has four layouts, but I don't really use any of them other than the "normal" (turtle) one anyway. It also seems to use relatively little battery, which is nice.

I also finally got on the Evernote boat, and I downloaded Yellow Pages Mobile, which I don't really use.

Hamlet and Watchmen

First, here is a picture of David Tennant rehearsing for his role as Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I can't decide if it's really him, but the dude in the background looks like Patrick Stewart. It looks even more like him in this picture.


On a related note, rumors are flying around that Neil Gaiman is going to write an episode of Doctor Who. On his blog he wrote a humorous line referencing Tennant's role as Hamlet.

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

On an unrelated but even more awesome note, the trailer for the Watchmen movie is officially out, and is playing in front of The Dark Knight. It looks really good.

Cool iPhone Apps

Every blog everywhere seems to be doing something like this, so I figured I'd do it too: Here are my impressions of various iPhone apps, and iPhone apps in general. So first, the apps I currently have on my iPod Touch (they're all free).

Remote: Cool, and very well made, though I have yet to actually "need" it.

AIM: Seems pretty well done, though until September when the update allowing apps to run in the background comes out, it's relatively useless...

NetNewsWire: Not really that much better (or worse) than the web app (except for the icon, which is cool), but hopefully in September there will be a badge showing your unread count.

Last.fm: Since I don't really use Last.fm to listen to suggested songs, I don't really use this either, but hopefully the September update will allow scrobbling.

Twitterrific: Seems the same as the Mac version, except this one crashes my entire iPod when I open it, so that seems like kind of a downside. Update soon?

NYTimes: I guess if I read the news more this would be cool, but maybe this will make me read the news more...

WritingPad: Really cool idea, and the actual "writing" works well, but the layout/execution of the rest of the app is lacking, and it crashes semi-frequently... hopefully an update will come out soon.

Zenbe Notes: Pretty cool, and well constructed, I just hate the home screen icon. And the name is kind of weird too (especially since it just shows up as "Zenbe" on the actual iPod).

Loopt: Cool idea, works pretty well, but I don't know anyone else who uses it so that sort of blows half the point of the app.

Banner: Technically called "Banner Free," which my only real gripe with it, this is actually something I've been wanting to do for a while.

Yelp: Kind of like Loopt (since Loopt uses Yelp's servers), except not as cool.

To Do: A very simple to do app, which is cool, except it's kind of hard to use. For example, you have to make a blank to do, and then edit it. Everything is laid out somewhat poorly also. The icon is also way too light, not to mention boring.

Aurora Feint: Neat graphics, and pretty addicting, but the actual game isn't that interesting/fun (kind of like WoW). Also, it's around 30 megabytes. I'll probably be getting rid of this soon.

Morocco: Also known as "Othello" or "Reversi," you can play against the "computer" or another person (not over wifi though). I've never really played this before, but the app is well-written, and the computer beats me easily every time (on easy) so I must suck.

Overall, none of the applications I've gotten (even the ones I like) are really any better than web apps, with the exception of Aurora Feint which, as I mentioned, is kind of boring anyway. Without the ability to run in the background, most of the things I want to be able to do on my iPod (like IM, use Twitter, and read RSS feeds) will be somewhat limited. Hopefully the update in September will fix all this, but until then I'm very underwhelmed.

Sometime in the future, there will be a Spore game for iPhone, which I am varyingly excited about, as I am with all things related to Spore.

EDIT: This post ended up being a lot longer than I imagined it would...

Turnpikes and Trappers

I don't have my list handy here at work, but I played a pretty fast Red/White deck with no finishers. The only playable rare I really got was Puppeteer Clique which, along with a few removal spells, I should have splashed black for. My largest creature was a 4/4. I had several tapping cards (Ballynock Trapper, Somnomancer, and two Curse of Chains), a few solid burn spells (two Fire at Will and Puncture Blast), and some decent creatures (Boggart-Ram Gang, Duergar Cave-Guard, and Harvest Gwyllion), but if I didn't win the race, I didn't have anything to win later.
All in all it was still a fun event, and I managed to get the blue/black dual land which, I suppose, I could sell, but I was still somewhat disappointed with my pool.

Tree Observed

One of the early ideas for an X Newspaper X article, back when everything written in a passive voice was funny, was "Tree Observed." It was never printed, but (as Carey humorously pointed out to me) that article now has a photo to go with it, courtesy of The New York Times.


Here's the actual article.

Manufacturer Charges Owners of Product $10

In a striking example of ingenuity yesterday, a manufacturing company announced that all owners of a certain product they produce will be charged an "owner's fee" of approximately $10. This announcement comes on the heels of a recent report detailing consumers' willingness to blindly do whatever a particular company tells them to, even pay more for something they already own.

Trend Expected to Continue

The trend of the word "trend" being used to describe the general tendency of events is expected to continue, researchers reported Tuesday. Said one, "We expect this trend of using the word trend to refer to trends will stretch well into the foreseeable future." This news comes in the midst of rumors that the "trend" trend would end abruptly.

Eventide madness

No, not that kind of madness...

I wonder what the avatar will do... "When this creature becomes tapped, you win the game"?
UPDATE: Or maybe, "When this creature is put into a graveyard from play, if it was tapped, you may search your library for a copy of this creature and put it and this creature into play tapped." Confusing and neat.

Black/Green is looking pretty appealing also...

More Spore

I got the full version of the Spore Creature Creator, and while I am slightly disappointed in its lack of awesomeness, and the overall feeling that it's a worthless thing to have (it will be made obsolete when the full version of the game comes out), at least it provides several extra parts to make more interesting creatures. Here are a few more I've made.

Growling sounds

One of the things that I lost when my hard drive died was an edited clip of Ratatat's song Wildcat. I had cut out just the growl sound that they use repeatedly in the song, and successfully (to some degree) removed the background music. I then used the file as the error sound on my Mac. I have nothing against the error sounds that come with OS X (I like "submarine"), but it was kind of cool to have "leopard" growling at me.

So I remade the file, but it doesn't seem quite as good as I remember the old one being. Oh well. You can download it in mp3 or aif format (you'll want the aif if you're going to use it on a Mac... the mp3 isn't really useful at all, but you could convert it to wav I suppose).