The Twilight Report

phonei

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:39:00 GMT

You should never buy new technology the day it comes out. This should be pretty self-evident. The Sony fan boys who camped out to buy themselves a PS3 now have an expensive (AU$1k minus the even more expensive HD TV that you will need to see any difference from a Wii or PS2) box allegedly without any good games. Nice one!

I was talking to someone last night who said she would rather play my yet to be implemented retro Orange Attack^[1], than all the complications and the internets and everything rolled up into a little ball.

Ahh the iPhone. Already predicted to be the next iPod right^[2]? Well, maybe you should ask some users:

Of course many of these issues will be corrected in time, but why brutalize yourself with Apple technical support unnecessarily^[3]? Let the fan boys do the beta testing which apparently Apple failed to do.

If you think about it you can probably guess what the game is like
iPhone: all set to do for phones what the iPod did for pods (I know I stole that somewhere, but can’t remember where: was it Colbert)
I am on my third iPod and had to send it back three times. If you do the math you will notice that I sent it back broken once and they didn’t even fix it! All this, mind you, with a device that had been out for years by the time I got it. Can you imagine my pain if I had gotten it the day it came out?

On being useful

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 02:51:00 GMT

The other day, someone at work asked me (not entirely out of the blue), if I “had anyone useful” in my family.

Without missing a beat I answered: “No, they are all scientists.”

Because it’s true, at least in the context of the conversation, which made the question more like do you have anyone with skills that are useful to ordinary people in your family. I mean, they contribute to the sum of human knowledge, and arguably do important things, but hardly useful skills, such as being able to cut hair (like Nina’s husband) or even fixing a Windows XP machine full of viruses that you stupidly downloaded (like me. er, the fixing part, not the downloading of viruses part).

“But wait,” I added, “it gets worse, because I grew up in a company town, where the ‘company’ was a federal laboratory, and everyone who lived in the town were also scientists.”

Later, when I was explaining this conversation to my mum (who didn’t seem to find it as inherently funny as I did), she pointed out to me that there are also engineers in Los Alamos.

“Well, they can be useful.” I said.

“Not those engineers.”

Mum seems to hold engineers in the same esteem as people who live in Melbourne (“seriously,” I can imagine her saying, “if you are in Australia, why wouldn’t you live in Sydney?”).

I know this attitude sort of filtered down to me, unfortunately, because early on when I met my friends in New York who also worked at The Company, I said with some disdain that I wasn’t an engineer, when one of them described us as a group of engineers. I have always preferred the term “programmer” or “coder” (which is actually different from what my friends do), although I do have to admit my job title was “software engineer” for those six years in New York.

They are pretty cool engineers though. They do things like make the processors that go into all of the next generation video game consoles. (When the dust settles from this round of the Console Wars, I don’t know if Sony or Nintendo will be left standing, but either way The Company stands to make a tidy profit either way). More importantly, they are cool people, who know how to have a good time and be good friends.

I told my photography teacher what my friends did once, and she thought those GPUs The Company was making were a waste of resources that could have been more appropriately allocated. Seriously though, who is she kidding, she is a professional photographer. What is she contributing to the world that is so awesome that she can go around judging other people? There is nothing wrong with being a photographer, but there is everything wrong with being judgemental and condescending.

The Essentials

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:14:00 GMT

Australia is treating me well for the most part. I have a job at the Uni putting computers together, and I have discovered a region of Sydney that reminds me a little bit of Beacon (in terms of renewal, and location relative to transport). I still have to find a specific place to live, however.

My grandma went into hospital yesterday to have her hip replaced. Mum and I went up to Gosford to see her when she came out of surgery. She looked pretty well. Hopefully it will help her walk better. I wrote a note on the flowers that we gave her that mum composed:

Get hopping so we can go shopping!!!

My iPod is getting senile. A few weeks ago it lost its database and couldn't find any music, despite the fact that all the mp3s were stored on the drive and could easily be found using tcsh. I had to reboot it twice in the last hour. It's only a year old, it should really be more reliable. Last year I had to send it back to apple twice before they would fix something completely unrelated.