white noise

Like a good book, I was glued to every word. I had NO idea what might come next:

Luckily Jimmy Kimmel breaks it down for us:

Donna and I finally upgraded our cell phones. She went with the tiny Moto Krzr and I went with the BlackBerry Pearl (you know, made by Research In Motion – sicko). Both phones are a big step up from the old Motos we had. Smaller, lighter, and a lot more capable. We picked the phones up just prior to our trip to San Francisco (blog post on that coming soon) and the Pearl helped out a lot. A bunch of the things I like about the Pearl aren’t necessarily unique capabilities, but they are new to me, and like McD’s, I’m loving it!

Email and IM:
First off, it’s great to be able to have all my email, from several accounts, all push to my phone as they come in. I don’t have to start a browser and check anything. Instead I get a chime and an LED flashes. If I happen to have any mail clients open on any computer, they get the email instead of the Blackberry, but if I’m otherwise disconnected, emails will show up on the phone. If I delete emails from the phone, I can choose whether to leave them on the originating mail server in case I want to save or follow up later. Otherwise I can choose to remove mail from the handset and the server and keep my inboxes in control while I’m away. It’s not exactly fun to be tethered to work email while I’m out of the office, but having the ability is very nice. After all the majority of my personal email comes through my work email anyway.

Instant Messaging is also working well. It’s an integrated client (not browser based) that does a similar chime and LED notification as email. I was surprised how iPhone-like my MSN messages look as they appear all bubbled and threaded. I’m still trying to get LCS messaging to work with our corporate server. It seems I’m close, but the connection is still not getting made. One thing’s for sure, I’ve been using SMS a LOT less since I now now use true IM.

Syncing contacts is also a breeze with Outlook. I have to plug in via USB, but everything syncs instantly either at home and work.

On the ball and SureType:
Yeah, it’s no fancy, schmancy multipoint touchscreen, but the interaction model on the Pearl is great. Most navigation is done with a tiny trackball (the ‘pearl’) which is miles better than conventional D-pads. Meanwhile typing is done using a qwerty-like keyboard but one in which most keys are shared by two letters. Although you can multitap type like on other numeric keyboards, the default is to just hit each key once regardless of the letter. Blackberry’s SureType AI guesses at the words you want and presents options when it’s actually not sure. Although it sounds error-prone and frustrating it really works well after a short learning curve. Like all the reviews I read before getting one – you really have to try it to see how well it works. Now I believe people when they say they can type faster on this than on regular qwerty PDAs. The other cool thing is that this is naturally like a spell check always running which is of great use to me.

Additional Apps:
I’m finding that since Blackberry is a popular platform that’s been around a long time there are a bunch of add-ons readily available on the web. A native version of Google maps was the first one I loaded (and man, was that handy in San Fran), but there’s a bunch I’ll be exploring for a while. Currently I’m checking out the free java development kit that Blackberry provides. It even includes various simulators to mimic mail servers and such so you can try out all aspects of your app/theme before loading it on your phone. Oh yeah, I guess this is as good a place as any to say it’s got a decent camera with flash (that’ll I’ll almost never use), and capabilities for playing music and videos (which I’m finding I’m using more than I expected).

What’s Missing:
Almost nothing has bothered me so far, but I’m annoyed there’s no support for Flash Lite, the mobile spec for Flash. I don’t think think that takes away much, but as a Web monkey and Flash junkie it stings.

I’m not talking about the soap of my namesake, General Hospital, but the video game Guitar Hero. If you’ve never heard of it or seen it, it’s like a modern adaptation of playing air-guitar crossed with the game Dance Dance Revolution.

The game (we play on a PS2) uses an undersized, guitar-shaped, controller in lieu of the usual gamepad. There are 5 fret buttons, one flipper you strum up or down, and a whammy bar. It’s roughly the equivalent of playing 5 notes on a single string of a guitar. But they do switch it up at harder difficulty levels by using two and three finger chords (nevermind the single string strumming model). You play along to various songs from the last 30 years, strumming notes in time with a tablature-like animation on screen.

The first time you play it, it can be very humbling. The guitar parts you hear playing in the song will actually drop out and make errant noises for every note you miss. Between that effect and the realtime tremolo applied by the whammy, the game creates a great illusion that you’re actually playing the music when in fact (especially on easier levels) you may only be required to strum every other (or maybe even every third) note that you’re hearing. After a couple practice songs, the game becomes incredibly addictive.

I picked up a bundle of two guitar controllers and two games (the original and the sequel, Guitar Hero 2) for cheap from one of the guys at MillionManLan. Since then I play it a lot. More than any other game now in fact. And that’s saying a lot since it’s on the ol’ PS2 and not my PC. Between Rayman Raving Rabbids and Guitar Hero, there’s surprisingly much new life in our Playstation. It’s pretty cool that a gaming platform that old can still seriously compete (for my attention) with the latest offerings on the PC. Just like when playing old arcade emulations, I’m reminded that great gaming isn’t always about the slickest eye candy.

The other thing I find remarkable about Guitar Hero is that it’s actually changed the way I listen to music. Thanks to years of band and drum corp in my youth, I’m percussion-centric in my listening. I listen for the beats, tap the beats, anticipate the beats, etc. And due to my own musical endeavors I prefer music heavier on the electronic end of things. I listen to the textures, layers, effects and so on. Listening for (or even tolerating in some cases) guitar parts in songs probably doesn’t even come third. Even though I’ve played a bit of guitar, I don’t think in guitar. It doesn’t speak to me, like drums and synths do, or like vocals do for other people. But I was listening to XM the other day in the car, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself doing the air guitar thing…thinking about how I’d need to reach for orange on this note or that.

Last weekend I spent the bulk of two days cleaning up my man lair – or rather our extra bedroom where my computer and a bunch of other electronics live. It started out with a simple goal of swapping one bookcase with another and ended up as a monumental task of sifting through files, old magazines, and other bits. In all, I got rid of probably three full brown paper bags of paper. Stuff I didn’t even know I had.

I don’t think of myself as too much of a pack rat. Yes, there are things I collect. Wires, cables, cords…I can never have enough of them. Bolts, screws, and other assorted fasteners…I can never bring myself to throw any away. But in each of those cases I’m actually pretty organized in how I store them, plus I do use them quite a bit. On the other hand there’s stuff that’s not collected, but instead just remains. Old magazines with that one interesting article I’ll find time to read someday. Old computer game disc cases that seem like they may be of use later. Old files stuffed with paper that I haven’t looked at in years, but I think “if it was worth filing, isn’t it worth keeping” (btw, NO). This is the stuff that starts to crush you under its weight of irrelevance.

A lot of the stuff had come from college (or even before) and simply made the move over the years without much scrutiny. Brochures from colleges I was considering for a Masters. Correspondence with companies during my post-grad job hunt. Abstracts and white papers related to satellite construction and control systems. All of it about 12 years old. Among the more interesting finds was an issue of Popular Science from 1993. The cover exclaimed “New Brains for Personal Computers”. Inside the feature hailed the upcoming release of the Pentium processor with speeds up to 66MHz. Prices of the Pentium-equipped machines were stated to run $5000 to $8000. In the same issue, the “What’s New” section showed a color printer with a remarkably low price of $995. It claimed that the unit was much less expensive than other color printers because the processing was handled in software on DOS rather than in onboard hardware. Ah, good old Moore’s law has treated us well.

The dust continues to settle.