Linkstew

It's hard to believe (and a little embarrassing to admit), but at this point, I've gone through six iPods. The very first one, a 20 GB, a 60 GB that died on me, a short lived iPod mini which was quickly returned (due to the mini lacking a album line on the "now playing" screen), a 60 GB color, and now a 2G 8GB black iPod Nano; And so far, this is easily my favorite iPod yet:

It has an awesome form factor, the battery life is amazing, it holds as much music as I actually need (for awhile I was obsessed with being able to fit all of my music onto the device, but I've long since blown past that being a possibility and have learned to make do), and I basically have no complaints that would actally stop me from recommending the device.

A couple of comments:

While I was excited about the included "search" feature when I read about it, in practice I have never used it. On the other hand, I find the displaying of the current letter you're viewing when you're scrolling to be super useful (even with only 8 gigs) and I don't know how I lived without it before.

Not about the iPod in particular and I'll skip on the details, but the new iTunes interfaces fix a number of my long-standing issues with some of the configuration interfaces, even if a few of the annoying behaviors when plugging in an iPod remain.

And the battery life is simply amazing. I only charged it twice during my entire three weeks in India -- and one of those was right before I left for the plane trip.

However, there are two features that they've broke since previous versions of the iPod that I would like to see fixed:

1. It's no longer possible to turn on/off the backlight by holding down the menu button. I don't like the backlight on all the time, and I want to easily turn it on when I need it.

2. It's no longer possible to add anything *except* an individual song to the on-the-go-playlist. Not being able to add an album or an artist pretty much completely neuters the on-the-go functionality for my purposes.

But you know, bugs happen. I'm sure they'll be fixed.

4 minutes.

(I've been wanting to try doing "three minute reviews" as a writing exercise for awhile now, and this was my first attempt. Unfortunately, this review took about 6 minutes to write plus about 4 minutes of editing. And for the record, I'm posting this via the new phone's internet connection.)

In under an hour yesterday, I went from knowing the Nokia E62 was available from the Cingular store to having signed a new two year contract with Cingular and replacing my trusty Nokia 3650 with an E62. I've been hanging onto my Nokia 3650 for way too long, and I figured "Hey, what better time to change a fairly major component of my daily routine than 4 days before I leave for three weeks in India?"

The main thing that made this decision was the desire to have a fast unlocked phone while I'm in India for internet purposes, since data plans over there appear to be ridiculously cheap.

12 hours later, I'm not really regretting the decision, and it's nice to finally have a modern Cingular plan (rather than my in-limbo ATT wireless cingular plan). I like the big screen, I like the snappiness compared to the 3650, I like that it already works with iSync with a few hacks, I like having unlimited internet both on my phone and on my laptop via bluetooth, I *really* like the new KHTML based web browser, and I even like the size and form-factor and qwerty keypad (remember, my baseline wasn't the smallest phone in the world).

However, I do have a few small nits to pick with the phone so far:

• Cingular apparently chose to neuter the ability of Java applications to talk freely to the network; So, for example, when I'm using google maps for mobile, it currently endlessly asks me for permission to talk to the network. This is apparently Cingular's fault, and their effort to exort more money from application developers by forcing them to get Cingular to sign their applications for free network access.
• While I like the keypad so far -- the buttons are very nice to press, and I like the pointer better than I thought I would -- I am pretty annoyed at the moment by the inability to generate a number by holding down one of the number/letter keys when in text entry mode (as you could on old series 60 nokia devices). Instead, you apparently have to use the meta-shift button to get numbers when in text entry mode.

Other than that, I'm pretty happy with the device. Sure, I'll be wanting a device with a camera, wifi, and faster UMTS data probably within a year, but I've already been waiting a year and a half for my dream device, and in the meantime, this made for a pretty significant upgrade from my trusty 3650 (And it was cheap! $99 with 2 year contract and rebate).

I'll spare the web yet another dissertation on "what Mario Kart means to me," but suffice to say I've spent a lot of time playing past versions of this game, and most notably my dad and brother and I clocked an absurd amount of time with the original Mario Kart back in the day. So needless to say, I had high hopes for this game. And to be honest, I'm pretty disappointed with the result. It seems like in Nintendo's attempt to "simplify the game to appeal to broader audiences," they not only took out a lot of the subtlety, but also managed to completely change the focus of the game.

It wasn't the double driver change that messed things up. In fact, just adding double drivers to any of the previous games (with just a few other tweaks) probably would have introduced a whole new level to the game, and in general, the double drivers are a pretty good idea. No, the problem with Double Dash!! lies entirely in the revamped item system.

In the original Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo, there was usually only one or two sections of item blocks per lap, which meant that using your items strategically was very important. In Double Dash!!, in contrast, you get more items per lap than you really know what to do with. There are so many items in Double Dash, in fact, that it seems to work just as well to immediately use any item you get as it does to hold on to that item until just the right time. In fact, holding onto an item is practically discouraged, because you now lose items when you get hit by weapons, or fall off the track, or even when another player hits you while using a star or mushroom. In other words, if you try to hold onto an item until just the right time, it's pretty likely that you'll lose that item before you get a chance to use it, because there is so much chaos going on at any given time.

One interesting aspect of losing items when you get hit by a weapon is that the items fly out of you and land on the track, so players behind you can then hit them and use them (or take damage, in the case of shells and the like). Of course, this just adds to the proliferation of items in the game.

Now, if you're a Mario Kart veteran and you've been reading so far, you might say "well, I can just hop over things or brake when I hit a banana or shell behind me in defense or X or Y or Z and avoid losing." And if you're a Mario Kart veteran, you'd think that the double kart / double item aspect of the game would offer a lot of intriguing possibilities: You'd be able to hang on to one item with your driver, and have your gunner do defense duty with whatever items he picks up. If the gunner picks up a better item, switch and have the former driver do defense.

But if you're a Mario Kart veteran, you'd be pretty much dead wrong, because they removed pretty much every defensive aspect of the game I can think of. You can no longer brake immediately after hitting a banana peel to avoid peeling out. You can no longer hop in any way (which both makes dodging items harder, but also makes hopping over little cracks impossible, and makes hopping out of / over rough track impossible). And perhaps worst of all, you can no longer drag a shell or banana peel behind you in defense. The only methods of defense you have are: 1. Using Peach or Daisy, and their special item is a defensive fireball which will not only block items, but which will also grab the item and give it to you. 2. Fire/drop an item behind you immediately before something is about to hit you. This is actually possible thanks to a little bubble that tells you when a weapon is approaching, but it's less desirable than the old methods of defense, in my opinion.

Here's an unordered list of some other problems I've found with Double Dash!!:

• The battle arenas are too small and lack sufficient complexity to be as fun as any of the previous battle arenas.
• Though you have an option to select a random character/kart combo in single player GP mode, no such option exists for any of the multiplayer modes. This is a big bummer, because random is a pretty good method of handicapping in multiplayer. Also, randomness is fun. And seriously, why would you ever want to play with random characters on single player?
• In the multi player kart selection screen, there's no way to view the stats of the karts. This is a big problem, because when you have someone play the game for the first time, experienced players are going to have to explain "no, not all those karts actually work the same," and also remember the different stats of the different karts, and then pretty much just tell the newbie which kart to use, instead of letting them make their own choice. Bad interface move.
• I was really excited about the LAN features of the game and the prospect of an 8 player race, but apparently you can't pick your characters/kart in this mode, which is pretty much totally lame, and now I don't think I'm going to get a LAN adapter to try this mode. It's like Nintendo's trying to make their "people don't want to play games online" claim ffulfill itself by neutering their network features out of the box.
• There's no longer a ghost item to steal items. This was probably removed because there are other ways to steal items now, but the ghost also turned you invisible, which was another important strategic and defensive move -- and the hitting to steal play mechanic would have only made the ghost that much more useful. Bummer.
• Honestly, the tracks aren't that interesting. They're pretty much just rehashes of things we've had before, and we don't even get a Haunted Mansion in this game. Probably half of the levels are interchangeable, and there are only a handful of levels that I really like (My favorite so far is the Wario Coliseum).
• Did we honestly need two traffic levels? (No, we did not, especially when neither of them is as good as Toad's Turnpike on the N64)
• Also sadly, there's no sign of a Ghost Valley in this game -- Ghost Valleys were always my favorite.
• In the past games, if you hit someone who was jumping across a track, they would fall onto the other portion of the track, knocking them back in the pack. This was an another important strategy in the old games that is just completely missing in this game.
• The GBA game had the original SNES tracks as extras, so why didn't this game have the N64 tracks as extras? Oh, right, because most of the N64 tracks are already "available" in this game in one form or another. =\

• And I could go on and on. But I'll stop, because I'm sure you get my point by now.

To be fair, there are some good things about Double Dash!! Giving each character a special item was long overdue, and I think overall the special items are pretty well balanced. As mentioned above, the double driver aspect could have added a lot to the game, and I still think it's a sound idea that shouldn't get the axe in the next Mario Kart. The co-operative mode is a lot of fun, requiring fun communication between the driver and gunner -- I haven't had a chance to play co-operative vs. yet with 4 players, but it should be a lot of fun. The new Bob-omb Blast battle mode is a lot of chaotic fun, even if the new Shine Thief mode is a little flat. Meanwhile, the Balloon Battle mode just doesn't seem to have the same spark it once did.

I think the real evidence of how well the game succeeds at living up the Mario Kart name lies in this test: My dad used to play the original Mario Kart with my brother and I back in the day, and he was pretty good at it, all things considered. He was perhaps a little less devious with his item usage than my brother and I, but he was still competitive. However, when he tried to play Double Dash, he was just overwhelmed by the chaos of the weaponry and just didn't stand a chance. In other words, not only did their attempt at "simplification" ruin the game, but it also didn't actually work.

In short, Double Dash(!!) is pretty much all offense and no defense, with the general chaos that entails. I admit it's still fun, but I just don't think it's really the same game I knew and loved anymore. If you want some old fashioned Mario Karting, I highly recommend you pick up Mario Kart: Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance instead. Not only is it a much tighter Mario Kart game, but it also features all of the original SNES Mario Kart tracks as unlockables. Hopefully we'll see a real Mario Kart as a launch title for the next Nintendo console, with as much spit and polish on it as Super Smash Brothers Melee had.

3/5

On a whim yesterday, I saw a matinee of Underworld with Mark. All I knew about the movie before seeing it was that there were an awful lot of billboards for the movie about -- most notably on BART, where I saw them every day on my commute for seemingly the last month.

Anyway. Vampires. Werewolves. Vampires versus Werewolves. Kinda confusing at times, no thanks to there being a lot going on (like, hundreds of years of history you're at least briefly acquainted with -- we are dealing with vampires, after all), and several fight scenes that are just shootouts where everyone is wearing black.

The first action scene of the movie, for example, was completely incomprehensible for quite awhile, because it was completely unclear who was who in the fight. We knew which side Kate Beckinsale was on, of course, but other than that it was just kinda a mess until all the extras in the subway station were either killed or had fled. Some simple color coding would have been awfully useful. And speaking of Kate Beckinsale, she was extra hot in this movie.

The action scenes seemed a little spottily edited at times, but that could just be because we're all spoiled by the matrices absurd digital effects. Hoss said he saw an interview with Underworld's director, where he claimed he tried to avoid digital effects as much as possible. The action really wasn't anything special -- lots of loud gunfire, and see above re confusing part.

Also as mentioned above, the story was highly convoluted, and assumptions about who were the "good guys" and who were the "bad guys" were frequently turned upside-down... That's not a bad thing, of course, and in the end, there really was no "good side," but there were a few characters you found yourself wanting to "win" -- unfortunately, not all of them do.

The movie was fairly stylish, and I guess that's a point in the + column. But I still think the original Crow did this style much better, way back in the day.

Spoiler: Finally, apparently bi-heading a vampire counts the same as be-heading one. Who knew?

In the end, it was entertaining, but it had a number of problems that kept me from fully enjoying it. The ending also left a hook for a sequel -- something that wouldn't actually mind much, as long as Kate Beckinsale reprised her role.

3/5.

Saw: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Last weekend I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and I liked an awful lot. When I was little I used to love that ride, so seeing all the little homages to the ride in the movie was a real kick for me. And then rest of it kicked ass too, of course. There was hotness on both fronts, and nice fights, and a few little twists I didn't expect at all. It was by far the best movie I've seen all summer, and the first one I've really wanted to see again.

It's been more than two years since I got my Game Boy Advance, and in that time I had a lot of fun with the system. But as time passed, my ability to enjoy playing games on it diminished as I was often forced to sit in uncomfortable positions with a light shining brightly over my shoulder. So my primary reason for wanting a GBA SP was obviously the lit screen, and the other features were neutral in my mind. So, here's the bullet point version of what I think of of the SP:

• The lit screen definitely delivers as advertised, and I'm now free to play my games whenever and wherever I want. It's bright enough that it can even double as a flashlight when I'm walking down the stairs in the middle of the night.
• I was a little skeptical of the durability of the new hinge-based design, but now that I've fallen asleep on the SP a few times, it seems to hold up just as well as its predecessors. And when I shut the case before I fall asleep, the screen is even protected. Overall, a win.
• In contrast, it turns out the new metallic paint jobs aren't nearly as durable as the solid plastic colors of the original GBA. I've already got some scratches on the top of my SP that I have no idea where they came from.
• I'm amused to note that Nintendo made the same design decision that Apple did on the older PowerBooks: If the SP is closed and you're looking at it, the "Nintendo" logo is right side up. But if the SP is open and you're playing it, the "Nintendo" logo will be upside down to an observer.
• On that note, once I find my Apple stickers in my still unpacked boxes, I'm going to see if one will fit on the lid of the SP to cover the scratches, to make it look like a mini-PowerBook. =) Of course, then I'll have to decide if the Apple logo should be oriented PowerBook G3 or PowerBook G4 style.
• Though they don't say so anywhere I could find, "SP" is probably supposed to stand for "Super Portable." However, it's nowhere near as "super portable" as some of the micro-cellphones you can buy these days, and really, I don't think it's that much significantly more portable than the original GBA. I'm pretty sure it's thicker, and it's at most half as wide. Anyway, the point is, if you're worried about the size, it's small enough.
• In the other direction, though, is it too small? I don't think so. I even think that the L and R buttons may be a little easier to press than on the original, thanks to having more room to grip the longer body of the SP. However, I haven't played any L and R button intensive games yet, so I can't say for sure how comfortable it will be in the long term.
• As for the rest of the buttons, though I believe the primary buttons and dpad are a little smaller than the GBA, they're still easy to press. However, if you have big fingers, I could see problems with accidentally pressing A when you mean to press B.
• All of the buttons are recessed into the body of the unit (to keep them away from the screen when it's closed), and while this isn't a problem for the primary buttons, the start and select button can be difficult to press even for my not-too-big fingers. If your fingers are much bigger than mine, I suspect you might finding yourself using the eraser of a pencil (or maybe your fingernail or your pinky...) to press start and select.
• The volume control changed from being a dial to being a slider, and I think I liked the dial better. With the slider, I feel like I'm going to accidentally slip and turn it all the way up or all the way down every time I use it.
• Speaking of which, I'm still irritated that the SP doesn't have a headphone jack, and that EB claimed that Nintendo doesn't even make an adapter when I bought my SP. Also, reference this Penny Arcade strip.
• As for the position of the game slot on the bottom when playing classic games with bigger cartridges that stick out of the unit, it is a little irritating, and does prevent you from resting your hands on a table or your lap in certain cases, but it's not really that bad. And most games you'll be playing will probably be GBA games, anyway.
• I do kind of wish the unit had a way to put itself to sleep when the lid shuts, but I suspect that would require some software support that obviously isn't there in old games. At the very least, it would have been nice if the light and sound would shut off when you close the lid. Oh well.
• And the rechargeable battery pretty much kicks ass. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to last as long as a pair of AAs did in the GBA, but I'm playing with the light on full time, I'm not wasting batteries this way, and I can charge the unit without having to stop playing. Pretty much yay.

To sum up, the GBA SP is an overall win. It does have a few flaws in that the paint scratches easily, there's no headphone jack, the start/select buttons are kind of hard to press (but no worse than the Gamecube's stupid Z button), and classic Game Boy cartridges stick awfully far out of the bottom of the unit. But overall, if you're debating between buying a $70 GBA or a $100 GBA SP, the extra $30 will be well spent on the SP instead of another game in the long run. Consider that you'll save on the cost of batteries and glasses and it pretty quickly adds up.

Saw: The Hulk

I saw The Hulk last night (at the parkway. yay for the parkway.), and it definitely had its extremes. At times I really liked it, and it times I almost laughed out loud. While I was watching it, I was a little put off by the style, but thinking back on it today, I think it's growing on me. It definitely had some artistic cinematography. I don't really know what I was expecting, but I had serious suspension of disbelief issues...

I mean, seriously, how would a student at Berkeley afford to live in a house like that in the Berkeley hills? And I'd like to know where they found the sign that said "San Francisco 61, Berkeley 65." That's impossible in so many ways.

Saw: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

I saw T3, and it was enjoyable enough, but probably not quite worth the $6 I paid for a matinee. Maybe $4 or $5. It would have been far better to see it at the Parkway for cheap while eating pizza and drinking beer, and without so many preflight previews and ads -- I'll have to keep that in mind for the other summer movies I want to see. Anyway, I thought it was ridiculous how they got into Cate's father's lab off screen, apparently with no trouble at all. Also, there were a few too many homages to the first too movies -- almost like they thought this movie would be better if it referenced the first two a lot. Finally, while I thought Claire Danes was really cute with her red hair in My So Called Life back in the day, she really didn't do much for me at all in T3.

Read: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I finished the Order of the Phoenix some time last week, and I liked it just fine. I was glad that the end wasn't as much of a cliffhanger as the end of book 4, because then I'd be going crazy right now (I'm still glad I didn't actually read book 4 until earlier this year). I was also glad that the end of the book wasn't as unpredictably out of left field as book 4's ending, though on the flip side of that book 5 was perhaps a little too obvious. Thanks to that obviousness, I found myself much more interested in what was happening with Harry and Cho than what was going on in the rest of the story, because the rest of the story wasn't too hard to figure out. Pity there was only like 1 page of Cho every 50 pages or so. And thankfully there's no cliffhanger there, either.

Saw: Bruce Almighty

Saw Bruce Almighty today, and I was less than impressed. I can count the number of times I laughed on one (possibly seven-fingered) hand, and it got to be as sweet as Pepsi near the end. 2/5.

First, The Matrix Reloaded. I'm not going to say a lot, both because I don't want to spoil things for anybody and because I don't have a whole lot to say.

The short version is, I enjoyed it nearly as much as I enjoyed the original. But it's important to specify that I didn't love the first movie -- I enjoyed it, but a few months after I saw it and realized that everyone else was raving about it, I was left asking "Wait, did I see the same movie you did?" I would give both the original Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded around 4/5, though maybe a little less if I was having a bad day.

The one real problem I had with Reloaded was what felt like a lack of editing. There were a couple of scenes that I would have liked to have seen cut out of the movie completely, and several others just went on way way too long. I was also unhappy with how heavily dependent they made the ending on the "to be concluded." I would have liked to have seen them tie things up at the end of this episode just a little more -- it would have been doable, I think. As it was it just felt like lazy storytelling.

But, I liked the plot twist in the movie possibly more than I liked anything plotwise in the first movie, and there were some awesome action sequences, and overall, I had a pretty good time.

In case you haven't seen the movie yet, make sure you wait through the (incredibly long and dense) credits to see the Matrix Revolutions preview, which I think looked better than Reloaded.

As for X2, I enjoyed that a lot, and would give it a strong 4/5.

I really enjoyed Nightcrawler in the movie, except for the part where they modeled him after the newer more religious Nightcrawler in the comics. But the opening scene with him in the White House was just great.

I also really enjoyed recognizing the other characters that made brief appearances throughout the movie, and liked all of the character development that everyone whose name wasn't Ororo Munroe got. Nightcrawler was good, Wolverine saw good development, and I even enjoyed the little thing going back and forth between Ice Man and Rogue.

The action sequences were great, and I really liked the way all of the pieces of the final sequence in the dam came together. And I admit I didn't realize Magneto's ploy until just a few seconds before it happened. The one thing I didn't particularly like about this movie was that there was no real scene where all of the X-Men were fighting together.

I guess my only other real complaint about the movie was that it was almost too violent at times. Between Wolverine fighting the soldiers in the mansion, Pyro blasting the police, and the Wolverine/Lady Deathstryke battle... I was left saying "God that was violent" a few too many times. Oh, I guess one more complaint was just that Lady Deathstryke wasn't even named in the movie, and she was completely one dimensional (and hence wasted as a character) thanks to that mind control soup.

Fat Mike pretty much summed it up when he said "We've got a new album out... it's pretty much like all our other albums... It's maybe our third best." at the NOFX concert Monday night.

Actually, it's not exactly like all their other albums: The whole package is significantly more political than normal for NOFX. And that's a good thing. From the album art, to the quip that "Somewhere in Texas there is a village without its Idiot," to songs like Franco Un-American and American Errorist and The Idiots are Taking Over, to the bonus video of "The Idiot Son of an Asshole" on the CD-ROM and the trailer for the documentary "Unprecedented" about the 2000 Presidential Election, to the essay talking about all of this in the liner notes, Errorism has plenty of political commentary to go around. Sure, maybe it's a little over the top, but so's the President, so maybe it'll balance out.

Right off the bat, pretty much every track is listenable, which is more than I can say for some other NOFX albums. Some of it feels a little like Ska (which the essay in the liner notes admits to), while the rest of it sounds like modern NOFX. There's nothing new here: There are no real departures from the last several albums, and the lyrics wear their meaning right on their faces, but I really don't mind. The whole album flows very well, with transitions between plenty of good songs and no terrible songs.

In addition to the overall solid track mix, the CD has some enjoyable bonus features. There's a video of Franco Un-American, and a bonus track/video of the band performing "The Idiot Son of an Asshole" (which is a great song I wish had been directly on the CD), a trailer for a documentary about the 2000 election, and a pretty poorly performed introduction to all of that by Fat Mike and Erik Melvin. Anyway, I felt like they actually enhanced the value of the whole package.

If you're a fan of NOFX, you should absolutely buy this album (if you haven't already). If you're new to NOFX, this album would be a very good place to start: there's nothing that's going to make your ears bleed. Better still, the record was released on Fat Wreck Chords, so you shouldn't feel at all bad about buying it. If you're still uncertain, you could pick up the Regaining Unconsciousness EP, which has three of the best tracks off the album (Medio-Core, The Idiots are Taking Over, and Franco Un-American) plus a bonus b-side and an amusing commercial for the album. Or you could get both, and support Fat Wreck twice. =) I give it a 4 out of 5.