davejenbarnes

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Man, it’s been a while since I last posted anything. So, let me sum up the past few months.

Fatherhood

All of the parenting entries pretty much sum up that topic from Jen’s point of view, but being a dad is nothing like being a mom. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Thankfully, I am not designed with functional mammary glands (On a side note, I saw a commercial where a dad was shirtless and carrying his baby. The baby then latched on to the guy’s fatty pectorals and words appeared Sonic commercial style which read “need to lose some weight?”).

2. I work all day, somethimes on weekends, so I miss alot of the new and exciting things that James does during my work day.

3. I don’t get to cook as much. Allow me to explain: when I get home from work, all I want to do is play with James. This leaves very little time for me to prepare dinner like I used to. Jennifer has really stepped up and taken over much of the responsibility in this area to give me the most James-time.

Okay, so you get the idea. I love being a dad, but I have no where near the material to speak of that Jen does, so I’ll leave the rest of the parenting posts up to her.

Halo 2

Here’s something that’s quite strange. Halo 2 is a game that I purchased almost a year ago. I enjoy playing it more now, than I ever have in the past. Here’s a few reasons why (do you see the pattern yet?):

1. More Maps! Since my maptacular post, 5 more maps have been added! Backwash, Elongation, Gemini, Relic, and my new favorite map, Terminal.

2. The Banhammer! Cheating became rampant with the release of maps that resided on the easily hack-able Xbox Hard Drive. Matchmaking play became a frustrating and unenjoyable experience. Bungie, being fully aware of the problem, implemented an automated system that could detect many different forms of cheating and automatically ban the cheaters. Since then, I’ve had very few encounters with cheaters.

3. Teamwork! Since I basically play with the same chaps over an over, we’ve developed many strategies (some that work well, others that work well in theory, but never quite work in real life) and we’ve taken on different roles in our gameplay. I’m not saying we’re unstoppable, but I know that if I’m sniping, there’s someone watching my back to defend me, and vice-versa. I feel like I’ve actually achieved something when I work with my teammates, as opposed to just winning because I’m stinkin’ good.

Summary: Still playing Halo 2, and probably will be for a long time.

Other Games

I’ve purchased and rented a few games over the past few months. Here are a few:

1. Sid Meier’s Pirates — Absolutely fabulous game. It’s an incredible pirate simulator that lets you do everything from wooing the governer’s daughter in any one of the ports-o-call to waging all out war with a fleet of five battle frigates.

2. Burnout: Revenge — The next game in the Burnout series seemed to take a step backward, while taking several small steps to one side or the other. In previous Burnout games, all traffic was deadly, all the time. This game adds “traffic checking” (checking as in “I was playing hockey and body checking everyone!!!”) which in effect allows drivers to slam into traffic as long as it is going the same direction. This eliminates much of the tension of the older games, and makes good driving much less important. Track design is close to flawless, and each track is designed with takedowns in mind, whereas the previous games’ tracks were designed as race tracks.

Basically, even when I have other games, I always end up playing Halo 2 with my buddies.

Apple

Apple has been busy as of late. Here is another list of products that conforms to the pattern of this post:

1. iPod Nano — This replaces the iPod mini, and has been getting mixed reviews. The press loves it, and some consumers are complaining about their screen getting scratched up. My thoughts: the Nano’s plastic screen cover is made out of the same material that regular iPods’ screen covers are made out of. A similar sized scratch on the two respective ‘Pods will look proportionally huge on the Nano.

2. iPod — They still just call it an iPod, but now it plays video! When I first heard rumors about this, I thought to myself, “That sounds like an okay idea, but what the heck would I want to watch on an iPod?” Luckily, Apple was thinking the same thing (see #3)

3. iTunes 6.0 — You can now purchase TV shows, Music Videos, and several of Pixar’s animated shorts for $1.99 each. Here’s the really great part. You don’t have to just watch them on your iPod. When you download them, you can watch them on your computer (if you have your compy hooked up to your HDTV, you could watch them on TV). In my opinion, this is way cooler (and cheaper) than owning a season of your favorite TV show on DVD. The downsides: there aren’t any shows available that I’m interested in, and you can’t burn them onto a DVD if you wanted to.

Summary: I’m glad to see Apple continuing to push forward with great ideas and products that seem to speak to the masses. I hope they keep it up as the transition to Intel chips begins shortly.

Food

In order to use as many categories as possible, I’m going to mention this. Jen found a wicked awesome Blog. I’m hooked.

I want to get people to look at my pictures (isn’t that the point of a photo sharing community?), especially the ones that are quality photos, not just snapshots. Our photostream has been viewed over 6,000 times, and we’ve got one photo with over 700 views. But with the hundreds of thousands of flickr members out there, those numbers are just a drop in the bucket. In my search to become more popular (on flickr), I’ve made a rather obvious discovery: The more places people can access your photos from, the more people will access your photos.

Lately I’ve been keeping tabs on a new feature called interestingness. I’ve noticed that the most “interesting” pictures have loads of comments, sometimes have lotsa notes on them and usually belong to several dozen groups. My first thought was, “How did this picture get this many comments after just being uploaded this morning.” My second thought was, “Duh, the picture is in about 30 groups, so thousands of people are looking at it as soon as it is posted.” My third thought, “Why am I not doing the same thing?”

Things I’ve decided:

1) I’m now seeking highly specialized groups with large numbers of members to post my pictures in. For example, there is a group with more than 250 members dedicated to pictures that contain an animal yawning. Perfect. I’ve got three pictures of Mambo and Samba yawning. Less than 5 hours after joining that group, the photos had been favorited 6 times, with 7 comments total.

2) If you have 40 pictures that fit into a certain group, you shouldn’t add them all at the same time. Add one or two at a time. Each time you add a picture it goes to the top of the group photo pool, pushing the next most recent photos down. If you space out your additions of photos to a group, the better your chances are of people actually viewing them.

3) Tags are your friend. The more tags a picture has, the better the odds that the picture will actually get a hit from a search. The new clustering feature also seems to benefit from multiple taggings on a picture.

4) Notes make a picture more “interesting.” Case and point, someone took a screenshot of their OS X dashboard with about 30 or so widgets crowding the screen. Then they labeled each widget with a note. This picture made the top 50 most “interesting” pictures on flickr on August 3rd, without having many comments, views, or favorites. Also, I added two notes to the picture below, and it immediately jumped from our 6th most “interesting” picture to the 4th (it now happens to be the 2nd most “interesting” picture in our photostream).

Moral:

Don’t try to do this to all of your pictures. Select a few of your favorites, or pictures that you just want to show off. Once you have the picture, start adding notes, tag it like crazy and add it to as many groups as you can. In the near future, I plan to select a few more pictures, and go over the top with the above four items, just to see what happens. I’ll keep you posted to let you know how it goes.

Finally, if you don’t know what flickr is, or haven’t tried it yet, get on over there right now, and set up a free account. If you like looking at stuff and things, you’ll thank me.

Well, folks, the rumors are actually true this time. Apple has officially announced that in one year they will begin shipping Macintosh computers with Intel microprocessors. The reactions of the Mac community have been widespread, emphatic, and varied.

Here is what Mac Game Developers have to say.

Here is Apple’s official press release.

Here are my thoughts:

I’ve always loved the fact that Macs are different. The PowerPC processor kind of solidfied that: different hardware = different software. In order for a PC developer to write programs for the Mac, they would either need to spend several months porting the code, or start from scratch. Neither of those options result in quick turnarounds. This is one of the reasons Mac gaming is considered by many to be an oxymoron. A great game would come out on the PC, then Mac users would wait months, sometimes even years for a port. From reading the Game Developers’ comments, I think the switch will be great for the Mac Gaming community. PC ports will most likely have less turnaround, and will perform much better (Doom 3’s performance on the most tricked out Dual Processor G5 still pales in comparison to Gaming PCs). I’m a little concerend about the great companies that make their living primarily porting PC games, but I think that they’ll just adapt, and not necessarily dissapear. Okay, enough of my gaming tangent…as Steve Jobs pointed out in his Keynote speech (which I might add, looks phenomenal now that Quicktime 7 has been released (don’t fret Windows users, Apple made the Windows Public Preview available yesterday as well)) at this year’s WWDC, the soul of the Mac is not the hardware, but the OS. On this point, I totally agree. Since Apple will still be in control of both the Hardware and Software, the same user experience can be achieved regardless of the CPU’s architecture. All of Steve’s demoes during his Keynote were being run on a Mac with a Pentium 4 3.6 Ghz processor. Apparently, the Dev’s at Apple have secretly been comiling OS 10 on multiple platforms for 5 years, as Steve puts it, “just in case…” I think this is a positive step for Apple, but I think it will be a rocky transition. For example: I’ve been needing (read: wanting) a new computer for years now, but there is no way I’m going to be buying a PowerPC based machine when Apple is phasing them out. I believe that this announcement may slow Mac sales for the short term. This shouldn’t hurt Apple too much, since they’re sitting on a huge chunk of cash due mostly to the sales/profit margins of the iPods (I’ve heard that Apple makes upwards of 80% profit on each iPod sold). I am excited about the longterm prospects. The days of debunking the Megahertz Myth will soon be over. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent explaining how an 800 Mhz PowerPC processor can in some ways be faster than a 1 Ghz Pentium. That doesn’t matter anymore. Now, I think that the largely uneducated public will start to take Macintosh computers more seriously. Not many people will argue that ordinary PCs are more “stylish” and “cool” than ordinary Macs, but now that the Intel Inside logo may start appearing on the Apple packaging, people may think of Macs less as a status symbol, and more as serious competitor in the Windows saturated Personal Computing market.

Overall, I think it’s a good move at the right time for Apple. Now, it’s just a waiting game to see how the transition pans out.

On an unrelated, yet similar note, Microsoft will be using PowerPC chips in the Xbox 360. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Okay, I’ve been hugely busy as of late, and I’ve been using most of my free time to play Halo 2. So, I haven’t taken the time to write a post on my impressions of Tiger, Apple’s latest OS (version 10.4). But yesterday, I discovered something so cool, that I had to post something about it.

Sure, there are lots of “cool” things about Tiger: Dashboard, Automator, Spotlight, Safari RSS. But there are also a lot of new features that more hidden, and not as publicized. One that Steve Jobs featured during a recent Keynote speech was a screensaver that took all of the album art from your iTunes library, and created an ever-changing mosaic of album covers. I wanted to check this out, so I went to the screen saver preferences. This is where I found the “cool” thing which this post is about.

There is a new screen saver (apart from the album art one) that takes any RSS feed that is in Safari RSS and displays the information in a swirling mass of words similar to what one can produce using Apple’s Motion software. It’s a screen saver, but it can also be informative and is very fun to look at. Oh, did I mention that it is functional as well. At the bottom of each RSS entry that flies by the screen is a line that says, “press 1 to read more” then the next one would obviously say “press 2 to read more,” and so on. This allows the user watching the screensaver to go straight to the website from which the RSS orginated. The only addition I would make to this sweet screen saver is to make the RSS choice Randomizable, so you never know what’s going to pop up.

I’ll post some more coolness about Tiger as I find out more…

Apple

I always get excited the first time I see new stuff on Apple’s website!

Okay, I’m getting much further along in the Kingdom of Loathing, and I thought that it was time for me to post some more quotes. Here ya’ go:

You’re fighting a drunk goat. This goat is drunk as a skunk. Which means he’s considerably more drunk than a skunk who is as drunk as a goat. It gets the jump on you. It puts an arm (well, hoofed leg) around you and says “I love you, man. You’re my best friend.”

This is some sort of mushroom-looking thing with legs. It doesn’t look particularly dangerous, but looks can be deceiving. Since it also looks deceiving, though, I’m not really sure how you should interpret that.

You eat the White Castle burger. If greasy equals tasty, this is a very tasty burger.

This Guardsman is among the fiercest and most loyal of the Goblin King’s Guards. He’s so big his plate-mail is actually platter-mail.

January 29
The Hermit interface has been redesigned to be a little bit user-friendlier. In other news, “user-friendlier” is now the preferred way of saying “more user-friendly.”

When I hit level seven, I started a clan. It’s called Apple’s iClan. My brother Philip is a member, my nephew Ransom is a member, and several other chaps who are also mac enthusiasts. KoL has turned into a place where I can just spend a half hour and catch up with my brother, and have a few laughs. I may post more quotes in the future, but who knows…