Highly Advanced Cheese

I’ve had a Blackberry Storm since it came out in early November, and it’s safe to say we’re on the rocks and in need of some couples counseling. It’s been a rocky relationship and with this most recent firmware update, I don’t see it getting any better.

I was pretty excited when the BlackBerry Storm was first announced. I was, and minus the Storm still am, a big Blackberry fan, but I really wanted to get on the touch screen train. The iPhone wasn’t an option because AT&T doesn’t cover the area I live in, and also because I don’t like Apple.

So when I first heard about the Storm, I was relieved. Finally, here’s someone who’ll be able to show Apple how it’s done.

Not so much.

Ironically, the Storm’s most maligned feature is the one I like best: The SurePress system where the screen “clicks” in when you select something. I like the feature because it keeps you from typing something wrong just by accidentally brushing against the keypad. It takes a conscious effort to push in hard enough to click the screen, and also it gives a dual function: touching but not clicking is for selecting, and since Blackberries have always had copy and paste (looking at you Apple), that helps secure that function as well.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to make up for the myriad problems this thing has. None of them are major, but the add up into this nagging amorphous mass, like Tetsuo in Akira.

First off, there are a ton of performance issues. The thing is sluggish quite often. Applications don’t exit when you think you’re exiting them, they require you to click the button of the touch screen and select close. Otherwise they’ll all stay open forever and bog the phone down (sounds very Mac-like actually).

The camera is terrible. It takes thirty seconds to take a photo, and I don’t care how many megapixels this thing is supposed to have, the photos all look awful. I wouldn’t care about awful photos normally. It is a phone first after all. But if a camera takes this long to focus, it really ought to take better photos. Not to mention the flash is bright enough to kill a deer, which is why all my photos are of squinting people who look like they want to murder me. It has good uplinks to social media sites. It’d be nice if you could upload to multiple sites at once. Also, the Flickr geolocation feature never works. Ever.

The Web browser has its good days and bad. A lot of the bad involves times when you need flash. My main complaint is the navigation is not good. There is a navigation bar, but getting it to come up sometimes is like coaxing a vole out of its lair.

For some reason when people call, I can mash and mash on the answer button in vertical mode, but it only picks up if I turn it horizontally. Sometimes the phone doesn’t want to show any menu options during a call. When it does, they’re quite useful, when I’m not triggering them all with the side of my face. It’s nice having the ability to go in to the rest of your phone during a call, but then if you want to go back say to switch out of speaker phone or add someone to the call, that won’t happen.

The App situation is better. They need to mimic Apple even more than they have already though, and make an App World program for the PC. Especially if I’m going to spend money on a program, I’m more likely to do it on a PC where I can research it easily, and not just take a program’s description at its face value. The selection is still terrible, and a few apps I’ve downloaded by amateur programmers have killed performance and/or battery life until I killed the program.

Multimedia has been okay, although a bunch of video formats I’ve tried to put on it, it has refused to play. And it did so in a fashion where it locked up for about fifteen minutes before telling me so.

I suppose it’s the interface that bugs me the most. I just don’t care for it much. It’s too cut and dry. Not enough pizzaz. You can set your desktop background, and you can set the eight buttons on the desktop that have to go in the exact spots we’ve decided. That’s it.

So I’m thinking of a new phone, but I’m not sure. I like a lot of what I hear with the Palm Pre, but I don’t like where that keyboard is, and I’m a little gun shy about trying a new OS right off the rack again. I really like the idea of a phone with an OS by google, but so far I’ve heard Android - Yes, G1- no, and I think that’s the only G1 option out there right now.

Finally there’s the iPhone. I think the iPhone would be a great fit for me, but there still is no iPhone service here in San Juan County. Plus, I’m really hesitant to give more of my money to Apple until they stop trying to use the DRM on their videos to sell AppleTVs. I can stream video on my hard drive and from the Web to any computer in my house, and to any TV in my house, unless that video is in iTunes. Than Apple says I need to give them $200 more instead of using the setup I currently have that works so well. I really don’t want to reward them for being assholes.

Either way, I’m going to be stuck with the Storm for at least a few more months anyway. I hear they’re readying a Storm 2 that has improvements on the original, and removes the SurePress screen.

Great. They took out the one thing I liked.

Tomorrow I shall be driving to Salt Lake City. There will be video! Stay tuned.

On side note, how hard would it have been for J.J. Abrams and his crack team to realize Uhura couldn’t have been ordering Cardassian appetizers in the 23rd century, since first contact didn’t occur until the 24th century. It’s right there on Memory Alpha people.

Uhduh!

Everywhere I go, I can’t seem to avoid this stupid dumb stupid debate that’s stupid about the new Star Trek movie. The argument seems to be between passionate Star Trek fans, and those who are not.

The Star Trek fans are saying, “Now, look. No one wants new Star Trek more than we do. And believe me, no one thought Nemesis and Enterprise blew more than we did. But can you please tell us that this movie will have a modicum of respect toward the world we’ve come to know and love for the last few decades?”

The non-Star Trek fans argument is summarized as follows: “NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD!”

As you can probably tell from the above, I’m a little bit biased in this debate. From probably fifth grade of elementary school until junior/senior year in high school, I considered myself to be a fairly passionate Trekkie (Not a Trekker! Gross! Why would you say that?)

These weren’t fantastic times for me. I never had a ton of friends around this time. I tended to be a bit of a loner, with a handful of friends who had similar interests. I never really became socially comfortable until I got to college, and since then it still has always been a struggle.

But enough about my horrible, terrible (not really, it wasn’t that bad) life. When the other kids were making fun of me and not leaving me alone, Star Trek was a bit of a refuge. It was so big, I could pretty much just left it swallow me up and I could ignore the real world where people at school were calling me “London Broil” for some reason (might have to do with my living in London, not sure).

I feel a lot of Star Trek fans are similar to me. I mean, they call us nerds for a reason. Which is why I feel some of this rush to condemn Trek canon because J.J. Abrams wants to jump on the remake crazy train is regressing a lot of people to schoolyard bullies. For some people, Star Trek is all they’ve got. Why do you want to take it away? Sure it’s not healthy to obsess about something so completely, but many people do it because they’ve got bigger issues than how much grain a Tribble can eat in a half hour.

As for the movie itself (which I just saw), I feel sorta ambivalent. It was an okay movie, but I’d rank it probably on the same level as the other mediocre Star Trek movies. It artificially raised the stakes to make this a “SAVE THE WORLD” kind of movie. That puts it in the same company as First Contact, and I guess you could do worse.

I think in the rush to make this movie, people forgot that Star Trek has always been at its heart a TELEVISION franchise. Whether the mission is five-years long or just continuing, Roddenberry’s vision is all about exploration. “Wagon train to the stars,” I believe was his catchphrase.

He never said anything about trying to save Earth from Romulans from the future, which is not an alternate past.

I think?

I don’t talk about politics often. I don’t enjoy it. It’s like putting a giant ‘KICK ME’ sign on your back. Not to mention my chosen profession frowns upon it.

Still, I feel like something needs to mark this occasion. I’ve put up with a lot of BS from the side of the political spectrum I most readily identify with. I’ve done this because for the most part I’ve share more views with them then I did the other side.

No longer.

The whiny histrionics and drama-llama protests was one thing. I hated them when the other side did it, what makes you think I would enjoy it when you started doing it.

But what really did it is the first person used the S word. I think it was the governor of Texas.

This is what this was in regards to:

“May the rats eat your eyes. I am now lost to your cause.”

There are some days I really love my job. The following is taken from a post made in my newspaper’s reader forum. “Phogan” is, of course, yours truly.It was a poll, asking the following question:

Who thinks Phogan (online editor) is a F**kStick?

• Me

• Not me

• Who's phogan

This was quickly followed up with the following four comments

Kevin, no one is forcing you to read the FREE online copy of the daily times. If you don't like Phogan, then don't read it.
stuff like this is what causes trouble for legitimate polls
Phogan is an idiots to the peoples!
nice grammer

I’ll have to put that on my resume under qualifications: “Idiot to the peoples”

Sara Watkins’ performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

“May the rats eat your eyes! I am now lost to your cause.”
-Maximillian Roivas

I’m not sure how I put myself in a positiong where on a daily basis I use three different operating systems, but here I am. At work I use Mac OS, at home I use Windows and on the road I use Ubuntu. Only one of those three is involuntary and it’s Mac OS, and I would replace it in an eyeblink given the oppurtunity.

I use Ubuntu and Windows for very different reasons, but each has a niche. I use Windows because the platform supports a very wide range of software I’ve become very accustomed too, and it’s the platform of record for PC gaming. I use Ubuntu because it’s a version of Linux I can wrap my mind around and I like to support open source software when its not too inconvenient. Mac doesn’t have software I like, doesn’t have games and is super proprietary.

Plus I hate the “Help” button.

I’ve really gotten into Warhammer Online recently. I first played its launch and was quickly interested and then bored with it. As long as it takes to level a Shadow Warrior to 15 is for how long I played it.

I pretty much played Warhammer the way I played World of Warcraft, I just did regular quests and scenarios. I really didn’t understand the whole RvR concept, nor the fact that my XP bar was complemented by a RP and INF bar that I could level for other benefits. As there are far fewer dungeons in War, it meant my experience was fairly bland and dull.

When I came back, I decided to try a different class, so I put down my Shadow Warrior and decided to try a Warrior Priest. I learned I could farm public quests for INF rewards and I finally figured out RvR, which is a barrel of fun. The Warrior Priest is a tough class to play, and I’m still learning what it can and can’t do. It’s a primary healer, but it has a separate mana pool for heals separate from the action bar that can only be regenerated by attacks, mostly melee attacks. Sure, Supplication can convert AP to RF, but try doing that during RvR and five allies will have fallen while you were praying to Sigmar.

What’s most interesting to me are the people playing WAR. I’ve been in three different guilds so far, and every guild I join, the GM goes out of their way to tell me that this is a former Dark Age of Camelot guild, and all the guild elders are DAoC players.

I never played DAoC. It was the Camelot that turned me off, because I understand the actual game had very little to do with Arthurian legend. What impresses me the most about all these DAoC players is not their brand loyalty to Mythic, but their brand hatred of Warcraft.

It’s pretty obvious upon a cursory examination of the Warhammer universe that Warcraft owes it quite a bit. To me though, the kind of imitation in Warcraft is that of the loving fan, not the plagiarist. I think if someone had oferred Blizzard the Warhammer license around the time they were making the first Warcraft game, the Warcraft franchise would never exist. But this isn’t the problem. Even in that imaginery scenario, the former DAoC fans would still be playing a Mythic MMO and bitching about how much they hate WoW.

What I think they dislike is Warcraft’s success. I’m sure it siphoned plenty of Camelot players away. It’s also killed off many a fledgling MMO and is threatening the same now with Warhammer (a healthy MMO does not contract servers).

What’s my point? No point? Just found it interesting is all.

There’s the rally call, gotta get back to Troll Country!