So, what's up?
We now return our regular infrequent updates, already in progress.
The iPod Touch continues to be a really nice gizmo. Now only do I still use it as my primary home email interface, but it’s also my front end to Wikipedia, the New York Times, and Pandora Radio thanks to some excellent applications. Every night Sarah and I pass a game of Scrabble back and forth. The Scrabble app is surprisingly complete, considering Hasbro phoned in their facebook version. It includes a nifty game play mode wherein each player places a word from the same set of letters, each player gets the score from their word, and whoever’s word has the higher score is kept on the board. It nicely eliminates luck from the game, so it’s all down to whoever can tease out the best word.
My XBox 360 briefly suffered from the red ring of death, but Microsoft’s surprisingly expedient (and free, even though my box was out of warranty) repair service had it back to me in about a week. While there was a gap in my high definition gaming I decided to actually buy a game for the so far only used for moving watching Playstation 3. I wanted a game exclusive to the PS3 (why would I play a game without achievements when I have the choice?) and a game on the cheap: Motorstorm fit the bill. Turns out, it’s not all that bad. I mean, if I had bought that as a first game for my PS3 for $60 I’d be mighty let-down, but as a bargain-game is pretty ok. Just imagine Excitbike thrown into a multi-route, gorgeously 3d (and it a very gorgeous game), and multi-vehicle game work and you’ll have a pretty good grasp of the game. It’s even got the same boosting/overheating mechanic. Unfortunately the developers were so focused on making the pretty, the forgot some of the fun. Yes there are some races were you can just pick any vehicle from big rig to motorcycle, but to artifically extend the length of the game the developers take away that choice whenever possible and force you to race in a a specific type of vehicle. As you win races you unlock new cars and courses, but most often you’ll unlock…the same course but with a different vehicle type that you are forced to use. Lame.
Sarah and I are enjoying the new series, Fringe. The science is completely bogus, but the show clicks together in a fun way.
Work continues to be awesome. I’ve finished up an internal IP address tracking tool and had a great time learning mod_python and jQuery while I was at it. jQuery is, simply put, an amazing accomplishment. JavaScript and AJAX made sane. jQuery plugins allow us coders to add in some terrific shiny things (e.g. jQuery Tablesorter) for the cost of properly marking up our HTML (which would have been done anyway), a one line include, and a one line jQuery script ($(”#myTable”).tablesorter();). Hello awesome!
Edward continues to get cuter and cuter. He loves to play peek-a-boo and is starting to get ticklish, which is exceedingly adorable. Moving continues to be his activity of choice and his favorite place to be is hanging out on one of our shoulders peering around at the world.