Thursday, June 30th, 2005
Gaming irritants
by Warren
We’ve all run into them, the little things that make playing otherwise good to great video games a hellish experience. I’m sure we can all come up with a few more examples ourselves.
We’ve all run into them, the little things that make playing otherwise good to great video games a hellish experience. I’m sure we can all come up with a few more examples ourselves.
Apple just added podcast support to iTunes, and so far it looks pretty slick. I only had a few minutes to play with the new features, but I managed to snag a few podcasts for the Skytrain commute with a minimum of fuss. It beats out my previous client, iPodder, though to be fair Apple has a whole lot more resources at its disposal than most of the small code shops cranking out podcast clients.
But this new wrinkle in iTunes isn’t as significant for guys like me, who’ve been listening to podcasts from the beginning, as it is for people who have no idea what a podcast is, don’t want to deal with crap like RSS enclosures, feeds, and whatnot, but are sick of commercial radio. My dad, for one is sure to be a regular listener of the NPR and BBC stuff on iTunes (as am I).
The NYT has an interesting article about rebuilding the war-torn shambles that is Kabul into something a little less broken.
Turns out Stephen “England’s Coolest Homo” Fry is going to write an episode of next season’s Doctor Who. This is great news, as besides being funnier than hell in Blackadder, he’s also one hell of a writer. And in case you’re wondering who the newest Gallifreyan is being played by, here’s some background info on David Tennant.
A solid gold look at the bitter, acrimonious later career of Grover Monster, the shining light of Sesame Street.
I generally hate going to the gym. It’s boring, repetitive, and almost every gym in existence plays middle of the road, crappy pop music at a ridiculous volume. But thanks to the one-two combo of my iPod Mini and some intellectually stimulating podcasts, the ritual of vanity-driven punishment is now pretty tolerable. It’s pretty surreal to watch Vancouver urbanites run and grunt to terrible tunes while I listen to the eminent philisophes of the BBC’s In Our Time or the lexiconical libations of the Word Nerds, but there we are.
And this only concerns myself and I Am Steven, really, but somebody has beat us to the punch and produced a podcast about Dr. Who.
So I was listening to the BBC World Service over breakfast yesterday (thanks to this fine Dashboard widget) and they had a story about the upcoming elections in Iran. They played a bit of the campaign commercial for the hard-line candidate. All well and good, expect he was using the theme music from “Alexander” in his ad. So, let me get this straight; music from a terrible, Western movie filled to brimming with homosexual innuendo and about a guy who invaded and conquered the Persian people is apparently entirely appropriate to a guy who wants to hold up the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Clearly, someone on his campaign needs to be fired. 🙂
If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s a finely crafted rant. A site I just stumbled across called Acme Hates Software look relatively new, but already there’s some Grade “A” bitching about various bits of poorly coded, clunky or otherwise frustrating programs. They seem to focus on OS X and Linux,which is odd since Windows is a never-ending sinkhole of crappiness. Not that the Mac and Linux boxen don’t deserve the occassional boot in the bottom too; maybe covering Windows is just too daunting a task.
Shades of Thomas Friedman! More NYT goodness, with an article about how one and two person companies are outsourcing the grunt work to overseas factories, programmers and other services.
I’m not sure if this is a great example of globalization working, or of people taking advantage of crappy labour conditions that used to only work in favor of major corporations. Either way, it’s an interesting read.
Apparently the current generation of “leet haxx0rs” aren’t content to download movies and trade video games. The newest rage amongst the young and digitally criminal is pilfering credit cards online. Some of the fleecing schemes these enterprising young fellows have set up would be impressive if they weren’t so damned scary, particularly for a confirmed Amazon.ca and iTunes Music Store addict like me.
Also, this new breed of digital villain makes my heady junior high days of trading pilfered Apple 2 games on 5 1/4 inch floppies looks pretty tame by comparison. 🙂