Things to come, maybe…

Haven’t forgotten this exists I just haven’t had the opportunity or motivation to write anything. So here is some of the things I’m playing with that might make it into a post. Or if you prefer “things that I am doing that might be interesting”.

The “cloud”. Holy shit clouds! From being told by a boss that he wants to build a better dropbox, to just using dropbox. Amazon Cloud Drive and S3 (yep I actually pay money for cloud storage now). Public, private, hybrid, oh my!

Macs, virtulization and you. How VMware would be my best friend if they would just make workstation for OS X. And well virtuilization is just awesome anyway. Macs are shiny! Have a couple virtual environments to build at work in the next few months. Every time I get to consolidate servers into a cluster made of a handful of servers I am a happy camper.

Games. Holy shit Steam likes my money. Bioshock is better the 2nd time I try to play it, so far at least. Buying games that I know I’ll never actually play (it is a sickness). On hiatus with WoW, I have more play time I just haven’t activated it yet. Don’t know if want to go at it again yet. PSN is back, I have probably already forgotten my password for it (probably the same with my battle.net one (stop making me change it every 3rd time I log in Blizzard)) downloaded the free games, and then got distracted by Saints Row 2 (play it!)

Google+ I have an account but haven’t gotten to mess with it too much yet. It doesn’t look like there is a Farmville or Angry Birds for it yet.

Wii would like to play

We recently came to own a Wii.  Which lead me to check out the library of Wii games.  And by check out I mean hit up my GameFly account to see if I needed to queue anything.  How many would you guess?  Zero?  Yep!

I just did another glance at the “popular” Wii games listed and it is mostly Nintendo games, and a couple movie tie ins.  One third of them had Mario in them.  Anyway back to the point.  What are the good Wii games?  Obviously the answer is the Nintendo franchise first party games.   Woo Zelda and Mario.

Why buy or rent a Wii game if you own any other modern console as well?  It is not like the Wii version is going to be better.  I don’t see how adding controller waggling is going to improve something.   I know the Wii has sold like crack-laced pancakes but every time the game play reports come out the most played games are always Wii Sports.  The game that came with the system.  I know we have played more Wii Sports Resort then the 2 Mario games we have so far.  Why?  Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a pretty good game and all, and I will probably be playing more of it but Sports Resort keeps going back in.  And we don’t even play many of the games!  Table tennis and the three point challenge, maybe bowling when those get old.

Now that I’ve said that I do like first party Nintendo games, it just doesn’t have much else going for it.  especially if I can get a better version of a game on another console.  Heck I have the GameCube version of Twilight Princess because it was graphically better then the Wii (also we didn’t have a Wii at the time) still haven’t beat it (I should get to that someday).

I will probably buy the new Zelda when it comes out, and I will probably get sick of the Wiimote gesturing for it.  And I will probably not finish it.  But that is 1 game purchase.  My GameCube had a similar fate.  I can count the games I bought for it with 1 hand.  Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Super SmashBros Melee , Ikaruga and Twilight Princess.  I have the Zelda collection for it as well but that doesn’t count.  Compare that to the shelf full of PS2 games I own, or the CD book full of PS1 games.  Same story with all other Nintendo products after the SNES.  A few DS games, a few GBA games, Hell I have more Sega Saturn games then DS games.

The PS3 is where this trend breaks though.  I think this is mainly due to the cost of the games, and the amount of time i can play a game, oh and GameFly.

Also Netflix on the Wii is pretty awesome.  Now I can stream bad TV shows to my TV! Having to use the disk is kind of annoying but it gets the job done.  I have the PS3 disk but it also is needed every time, and I could just use my PC at that point.

This turned into a little more anti-Wii then I intended but decided to let it post anyway.

Phones!

blog post about phones!

So now I have used almost every flavor of smart phone on the market currently.

Windows Mobile: I’ve had a Windows Mobile phone for the longest.  It was the first smart phone I bought, and well it was terrible at first.  Sprint HTC Touch.   Slow, buggy and kind of a pain to use.  Then I started loading custom ROMs on it.  I think right around when Sprint released the update that enabled the GPS to work.  Since the custom ROMs it has been better to use.  But not great.  If the hardware is good and some custom ROMs are available I’d consider getting a new one.

Blackberry: I’ve had these for awhile too in a work situation.  They are great little devices.  The UI is kind of lacking, but for messaging they work like a charm.   I never used it for anything personal though, all work related.  The Blackberry data plan would keep me from getting one for myself.

Android: I had wanted a HTC Hero for awhile, but I can’t upgrade the phone on my plan without upgrading the plan.  Eventually I got one from work, because they wanted to test out how Android works and all that fun stuff.  I am waiting for the 2.1 update to happen before I make up my mind on it.  It isn’t slow and it works with just about everything.  It does excellent email, exchange and gmail contacts.   The exchange support isn’t that great, it can’t do look ups so all the contacts have to be in your personal contacts.  Annoying.  I’m hopping that gets fixed.

iPhone: This is the most recent work phone.  I’ve had it for a week now.  I’m torn on how I feel about the thing.  It does somethings really well and others I wish it could do better.  It is a great toy.  I have mine jailbroken so I can squeeze a little more functionality out of it.  I don’t like how it doesn’t have good gmail capabilities if you have it connected to exchange.   If i want my Gmail contacts I have to buy an app for it.  It does do exchange look ups over active sync which is great.   No Google Voice app, just a webapp which works well enough.  That is my main issue.  Also the email system on it feels clunky and terrible.  I think windows mobile handles multiple accounts better.   But the device itself is nice, everything usually feels responsive.

I think I had more of a reason for writing this before I started, but I can’t remember now.