loonyblog.

Good lord, have I really not posted a blog update since the Oscars? What the heck is wrong with me?? Okay, that’s easy enough to answer. I’m busy with [TITLE REDACTED] and [TITLE REDACTED] not to mention [TITLE REDACTED], and what free time I have is usually taken up by Alice. But the real reason for the lack of updates here is actually Twitter. As you might see from the sidebar there (assuming you’re not reading this via RSS, which I guess 99.999% of people probably are), I post on Twitter fairly frequently. That’s typically where I’ll post the “hey look at this awesomely nerdy thing I found” stuff I used to post here. It’s just easier and faster than giving it a full blog post. And as a writer, I enjoy the challenge of making it work within the 140 character limit.

So where does that leave this blog? In a different place, I think. When I do post here, I want those posts to be longer and more thought out than anything I could just post on Twitter. So that means stuff like my ongoing Star Trek reviews (as soon as I get around to finishing my writeups on the remaining series, that is) or other longer-form musings. For anything else, there’s Twitter.

It’s funny that Twitter has so ravaged this blog. I can’t be the only one with this problem. So anyway, if you haven’t already, get on Twitter. And read this site via RSS, because there will be gaps between posts. I can’t commit to one post a week, but hopefully I can get it down to at least one per month.

If you watched this week’s Tekzilla, you may have noticed this (or not):

Yes, I’m that Jason. The Charlie in question is Charlie Sinhaseni, 2K’s intrepid PR manager. What prompted this, you ask? I’ll explain.

In the October episode of Qore (the PS3 video magazine hosted by Ms. Veronica Belmont), in their preview of Fallout 3, Veronica clearly says nuke-u-lar on more that one occasion. Want proof? Here’s the video…just jump to the 2:15 mark. Bam.

Anyway, this is obviously a problem and caused a clear rift between the two of us. I mean, here I thought we had something special, and she has to go and ruin it by saying nuke-u-lar. I haven’t gone so far as to take down the signed photo of her that’s on the wall by my desk (no really, I have one) and replace it with Olivia Munn or Kari Byron, but you know, it’s hard to get past that sort of thing.

So anyway, I joked with Charlie about it, who of course relayed this to her, and the result was the shoutout on this week’s show.

Which was kind of awesome. But at the same time, I’m not convinced. I mean, sure, she can pronounce the word properly, but nobody’s doubting that. Even Sarah Palin can pronounce it properly when it’s on a teleprompter that way. The real question is, how does she pronounce it when the camera isn’t rolling? What else isn’t she telling us?
And most importantly, does this disqualify her as a cohost of Tekzilla?

Probably not.

But getting a shoutout was kinda cool, right? Right?

Yeah, I’m a dork.

Care of Soren “Sporen” Johnson’s blog, comes this video of the Horace Greeley High School madrigal choir signing “Baba Yetu” from Civ IV:

He posted a bunch of them, and they’re all awesome, but what makes this one extra-specially cool is that in my younger, sillier days, I was actually in this choir. Given the state of video game music at the time, it was pretty unlikely that we were going to sing anything from a game (although hey, it would have been fun to try, right?).

Really cool to see that.

Apparently The WB CW, knowing that the writing is on the wall for Smallville, has started work on The Graysons, a coming-of-age series about a young Dick Grayson in his years before becoming Robin.

Ugh.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I mean, Birds of Prey didn’t have to suck, but it did. This? This is just a baaaaad idea. The proposed Bruce Wayne series, now that would have been pretty good. But a show about a young Grayson? Yeesh.

You never know. I mean, maybe it’ll be awesome. But I can’t see it. The kid’s got no powers. He’s just an acrobat!

But I guess we’ll see. Me, I’d probably be happy with a Green Arrow spin-off.

A little over a week ago, I was given an iPhone 3G (black, 16 GB) from my office as a trial run to replace my Blackberry. A bunch of us wanted them (for somewhat obvious reasons), and I happily volunteered to be the guinnea pig to see if it was a viable Blackberry alternative.

Cost-wise, it’s actually about the same, provided you don’t do much international traveling (which lately I haven’t been). Once you go international, the roaming charges get a bit extreme. But again, I don’t do that much.

Anyway, here’s the breakdown:

Pros:

• It’s an iPhone!
• Games/apps are awesome
• Keyboard is actually pretty good. I’ve adjusted to it. It’s not as fast to type on, but it’s not as slow as I thought it would be. The autocorrect for common mistakes is fantastic. I can almost type without looking after just one week. That said, it’s awkward to type long e-mails on it, and it takes much longer to type anything.
• Web browser is awesome, much better than Blackberry
• Love the contacts management. So much easier than BB.
• It’s a better phone than the BB. Better audio quality, easier to dial, visual voicemail is great.

Cons:

• No notification profiles: on my Blackberry, I had it so it would vibrate when I got an e-mail when in the holster, but make no audible notification when plugged in. The iPhone doesn’t let you do this. It’s either notification or no notification. So if I have audio on, I’ll get an audible nag every time I get an e-mail. There’s no way to turn one off without the other. This sucks. Also there’s no way to change the vibrations, and the e-mail vibration is very weak. It took me a while to get used to it at all.
• No syncing of ToDo lists or notes. There’s a third party app that will sync ToDo lists, but it requires signing up for a (free) web-based program that syncs it online. It’s a pain. There is no equivalent for notes, as far as I can tell.
• E-mail client lacks many major features such as searching of any kind, sorting by sender/recipient, etc. If you’re like me and keep your inbox pretty well sorted, then you can browse the folders to find e-mail. If you’re like some of my coworkers, with 1,000 unread e-mails, you’re probably screwed until they add searching. I also can’t figure out how to send a high-priority e-mail. I don’t think it’s possible.
• Battery life ain’t great. It’s not as bad as I feared – with WiFi off I don’t really have any problems. But I still have to charge it daily. If you travel without the charger, you’re kinda screwed. Be sure to get the 2.1 software update, as it makes it much, much better.
• No copy/paste. This definitely sucks. Hasn’t come up because I haven’t traveled with it yet, but when I’m on the road I used to use copy/paste a lot between e-mails/web browser, etc. Hopefully this gets added in soon.
• This is unrelated to the Blackberry comparison, but as an iPod, I’m not sure it’s superior to my 80 GB iPod Video. When I drive, I have no problem using the Video, as it has dedicated controls for everything. With the iPhone, I can’t skip songs or anything without fiddling with the touchscreen, which is kind of dangerous when driving. Not to mention that if the screen locks, I’m screwed, because I have to passkey-lock my iPhone since it’s tied to my Exchange account.
• …and while I’m on the subject of screen locking, it would be really nice if Apple could display the number of unread e-mails I have on that screen so I can decide whether or not to actually bother unlocking the screen. With my BB, I could look and see if it was worth unlocking. Yes, I usually do anyway, but if it’s a Sunday and I suddenly have a huge number of unread e-mails, I’m gonna know there’s a crisis. It’s a minor issue, but an issue nonetheless.

So what’s my conclusion? It’s not bad. It’s close. It’s really, really close. And definitely getting better. But it’s definitely no Blackberry yet.

Oh, and iTunes 8 is a giant POS. On my Mac at home, Genius keeps telling me to update half the time I try and use it, and shuffling no longer works, a problem that’s surprisingly wide-spread. I’ve resorted to using my iPod or iPhone to listen to music at home, since shuffling still works on those.

Bandwidth leachers are on the prowl again…after all those RSS readers blew up the last time I tried to do something about this problem I decided to be nice and make my rules much less stringent…but apparently that just encourages more direct linking, so I’ve made it harder again.

Please do me a favor and post in the comments if you don’t see a lovely picture of Nicole Kidman below. If you instead see my redirect image, let me know where you’re viewing the site from and I’ll do something about it.

I know I’m easily amused sometimes, but this PVP strip is damn funny. And if you don’t think so, then the hell with you.

Last night on the shack there was some reminiscing about The Old Days and sites that are long gone. This got me thinking about various people I’ve lost touch with over the years, one of whom was Jeremy Allford, who used to run AGN3D. He was one of those hardware review guys back the day, alongside guys like Kyle from Hard|OCP and Tom of his eponymous hardware site. I worked with him (virtually), although I did meet him in person a few times.

Jeremy was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor back in ‘99. He had to stop working shortly after that, which was sad to see. And sadly from there we all lost touch with him. I heard he had recovered somewhat, and even saw a website where he put up happy pictures of him and his family (that’s since been taken down).

I looked him up again last night, and it saddens me to say that Jeremy passed away just over a year ago, on June 5th, 2007. He was 35 years old. I was unable to find a published obituary, but I was able to look him up in the Social Security index. I also found a year-old forum post from his son Christopher confirming this.

I won’t pretend that I knew Jeremy very well. I knew him as an extremely prolific writer (good lord was that man prolific with his news posts) and as someone who was really well liked among those of us in the gaming scene. I know he was a very devoted husband and father and my belated condolences go out to his family.

I’ll leave you with this slideshow created by his son to be played at his funeral. They show a happy husband and father with his family, which I’m sure how he would like to be remembered. Jeremy was a good man, and he will be missed by all of us who knew and worked with him.

WARNING: This post violates the rules.

We’ve released a new trailer for CivRev featuring voiceover by…me:

Funny story about this trailer. I know it sounds like I’m speaking really fast here, but that’s actually my voice after being mechanically slowed down in the editing room! The recorded speed was much, much faster.

We did another round of these yesterday, and all I can say is that VO work is really hard. I guess I just naturally speak way too fast, because I had to really, really concentrate to read at a “normal” speed. The next video we release is going to be superfast as well, but the ones after that should hopefully be a little more manageable.

Until then, feel free to make fun of my Micro Machines-like voiceover work. I swear, I had no idea I talk that fast.