blog.erik.rainey.name

I recently got a AM-311S Digital Microscope (for Valentine's day), which is awesome. I then used said microscope to look at myself in great detail. Suffice it to say, my nose is a forest. Do not enter with a basket of cakes for your grandmother. There be wolves there.

I also took some great videos of my ring, my MacBook Pro and Amber's Diamond Nexus Earring. I'm not terribly good at holding things still under 50x to 200x magnification, but I'm working on it.

P.S.: My pores are a mess.

The iPhone is freakin' sweet. There's really no denying it after seeing the Keynote speech. However, even with all the new features and all the legitimate claims about being 5 years ahead the curve of Smartphones, it still lacks some rather basic features that the Danger Sidekick (One) had several years ago. They are:

• Auto-Synchronized Contacts to the Server. This means I never have to "sync" my device into a dock. It just works automatically. iPhone should really be doing this with .Mac integration. It would sell me on a .Mac account.
• Instant Messenger. (not some SMS fanciness). AIM, Y!, GTalk, MSN or Jabber. This is so basic that it pains me that they forgot (or ignored) this. I don't think that I need to say that it must a persistent IM connection, not something that will disconnect once I start roaming. Sidekick did it, why can't you iPhone?

Even after saying all this I'll probably be getting this. I'm a Mac whore of the first magnitude. I can't believe all the things they crammed in there. I'm just in shock.

Wow.


Just wow.

If you are a Mac user and haven't yet seen the new Leopard site, complete with videos of the new features, I recommend that you head over right away. They have some really neat sutff that I can't wait to get my hands on, like the iChat Presentation software and the To Do Lists in Mail (I'm a bit OCD about To Do Lists). I'm also very impressed by the Time Machine. A single-line version controlled filesystem is nothing new, but the interface to this one is what's impressive. The only downside is that I think of is that we'll need 200GB HDD's on the new laptops to have a decent history backlog. Head over and check it out!

I've beaten TES IV: Oblivion. 130 hours, level 30. I've pretty much exhausted all the quests except some of the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood.

I've been a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. The scale of the TES series has always blown me away just terms of the shear amount of content that they manage to put into the game. Oblivion definitely has lived up to the standard of the series thus far (i'm level 11). There's so many neat features they've added that are really awesome. I feel that I don't need to cover them here, since there are about a hundred reviews online about it. I will however cover my gripes.

• Mages Guild Teleports: I was going to complain about the lack of an instantaneous system of movement, until I realized that Fast Travel is the equivalent and it's free. So my gripe is that it's unrealistic. Traveling across the world should not take a few minutes. However, I can see that a method of calculating the time travel duration via roads and whatnot would be prohibitively complex.
• Skilling from Books: The amount of Skill Books in the game is severally diminished. I've found only 1 in the 20+ hours I've played so far.
• Chests tend to forget your stuff: I've lost about 2000 gold worth of stuff because I left it in chests that eventually get reset by the game with a default set of crap. Thankfully I'm playing the PC version and I can give myself all the stuff I lost by looking up the items in the TES Construction Set, finding the ID#, then adding the item in the in-game console. Only the hollow stump in the Merchant's Quarter in the Imperial City seems to be able to keep your stuff. I bet that there will be some quest related to it later, which might clear out my stuff later, so I'm going to play around with placing a chest with the TES Construction Set which I can use to keep some stuff in. I'd buy a house but they're rather expensive at this point (~15k). I am looking forward to buying one, so that I can arrange all the neat armour I've left sprawled all over the world, around my house. I know, it's a bit OCD to want to do that, but that's just fun to me.
• Recharging magical items: is ridiculously expensive. If it's a 3000 charge item, it's 3000 gold. That's a gold piece per swing!

Update: I forgot to mention my Oblivion PlayLog that I'm keeping on Backpackit.

I'm joining the chorus on this issue. Internet, this is big your chance. Step up to the plate and knock this one out of the park. Josh needs our help to let Firefly live again. This time our happiness is directly linked to DVD sales. You remember how we brought back Family Guy? It's back and better than ever. We can do it again. Let your money do the talking that the movie figures could not.

Buy the Firefly DVD. (referral link)
Buy the Serenity DVD. (referral link)

These will directly fund the next season, if we make enough to push it way over into the black. Do not dissapoint me, Internet! I want Cowboys in Space!

Awesome Feature List:

• 2 ATSC Tuners
• 2 NTSC Tuners
• 2 Cable Tuners
• 2 Tuners - each capable of ASTC, NTSC, or Cable.
• Component Video Out
• 2 Composite Out (for archaic VHS record I guess)
• 1 S-Video Out
• 1 TOS/Link Digital Audio Out
• 1 HDMI Out (supports 480i/p, 720p, 1080i)
• Ethernet (10/100)
• 2 USB (2.0)
• 1 External SATA
• VFD/LCD LED Panel on front showing currently recording show(s).
• Backlit remote

Disappointing features:

• SATA Drive is removable per se, but is not usable in another system, like a PC.
• Only records on 2 out of 6 tuners at a time. Sounds like the CPU is underpowered or the main bridge is a bit underwhelming. Looks like there's only 2 tuners, each with a load of codec and standards, so it's not a bridge issue.
• Only a 250GB drive as default. We need at least 400+ now. 300 GB drive. It'd be nice to have more though.

I was thinking to myself that it's amazing that rental music services still exist on the internet, because I thought that it was basically a losing proposition. I decided to test my hypothesis though...

Auf Ruby Bitte!
>> AvgLifeSpan = {"male" => 74, "female" => 78}
=> {"female"=>78, "male"=>74}
>> serviceFee=5
=> 5
>> CurrentAge=28
=> 28
>> YearsRemaining = AvgLifeSpan["male"] - CurrentAge
=> 46
>> MonthsRemaining = YearsRemaining * 12
=> 552
>> EstimatedServiceCost = MonthsRemaining * serviceFee
=> 2760
>> CurrentSongCount=2872
=> 2872
>> CostPerSong=0.99
=> 0.99
>> TotalCurrentInvestment=CurrentSongCount * CostPerSong
=> 2843.28

So given a flat service fee for life (impossible given inflation), I'm just about to hit the tipping point. But then I remembered...
>> AbilityToPlayMyMusicAnywhereOrAnyhow="Priceless"
=> "Priceless"


I would have liked to have go into a diatribe about how the Chronicles of Narnia has a bad story at heart, but I was beat to the punch by someone else. 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion' Read it.

Well I've had the mighty mouse for about a month now and I have to say that it's got problems. First I'd like to mention the good stuff:

• Slick Overall Design - typical Apple.
• Innovative use of pressure buttons.
• In theory the squirrel ball is a good idea.
• Touch sensitive button diferentiation is clever.

Overall a neat concept, but as I am about to elaborate, not a good implementation. Now the problems:

• Short Cord. I'm talking like a foot and a half here. What were you thinking Apple? Was this supposed to plug into the right hand of some keyboard? How about an extension cable?
• Very very small squirrel ball. Needs to be about 1.5x to 2x as big. This problem is compounded by Apple's weak acceleration models. Scrolling through a long page or document is utterly distasteful. I ended up downloading USB Overdrive and tweaking the accelerations so that it behaved more "normally" (read: more like Windows).
• Button differentiation is weak, and sometimes does not work. I have to mentally remind myself to lift my other fingers when I right/middle click. This is further compounded by clicks on the squirrel ball taking an inordinate amount of time to complete (invokes Dashboard). And it's even further compounded by having a slower machine (Mini 1.25Ghz).
• Design is not ergonomic. Apple, look at Logitech's mice. Learn. A mouse, much like my hand, is not and should not be symmetric. I constantly feel like I'm holding it wrong. I'm never just comfortable with it. I have to move my grip around so that I can activate the pressure buttons and I have grip it with another hand-stance to get the "slow" right clicks off. These occur when the machine is busy access disk. Everything is more lethargic when this occurs, including getting the context menu. In these conditions, I'm not sure if it's the machine or the mouse which dropped the "right" part of the context.
• The optical sensor is a bit behind the times. When I use it without a bad on a wood desk with a light color and grain pattern, it gets easily lost and when it does, it zips to the bottom left hand corner (which irritatingly activates my screensaver). There's much higher resolution technologies that can help alleviate that problem. Again, refer to Logitech.

In the end, it would have been better for me not to get one. This is obviously a first version prototype, that somehow got past their faulty product sensors and got to market. Though based on their previous designs, I think Apple has a staff of lilliputians with crab hands doing their mouse design.