disjoint thoughts

I added a little JavaScript widget to the right side of the blog to show my last 5 del.icio.us posts. If you’re really interested in what I’m reading you can subscribe to the rss feed.

It seems to be very easy to fill your blog up with useless crap. A common example of that would be 99% of the myspace profile pages that exist. I can’t help but want to add things that I think are useful though. What I would really like is to have the whole right side bar disappear until the user moused over a certain icon or area of the screen. Keep it nice and clean until the reader wants to see more. Hmm…

I never learned how to play golf (except my brother and I seeing how far we could drive on the farm, then using the quad to ride around picking up the balls). My father wanted me to learn how to play because he felt that all the big business deals were made on the golf course. If I didn’t learn how to play, he thought I would run into a glass ceiling or something. Every now and then I wish I knew how to play, but I don’t think it has effected my career.

In related news: Woot (who typically sells techy/geeky/nerdy things) has a driver for sale.

I signed up for a local phone number via AOL’s free voip service. It’s supposed to allow you to accept unlimited incoming calls. Combine this with Skype’s free outgoing calls and you’re all set. The problem is AOL sucks! I signed up for the service, downloaded and installed the latest AIM client and tried calling myself from my cell. The AIM client notifies me that there’s an incoming call, but when I click on the Answer button it just sits there trying to connect my call. From the calling end, the line keeps ringing until it goes to voice mail. I tried running it on my work pc and my laptop without sucess. There also seems to be some bugs when you run two AIM clients at the same time and try to answer a call from one.

I think it’s still in beta, so I guess I can’t be too harsh. I would say it’s definately worth signing up for a local number incase there’s a limit on how many the give out. But I would wait for the service to mature before attempting to use it.

I love the mac vs pc ads that apple has created, but I like Ctrl+Alt+Del’s take on them more. I won’t start on why I don’t have a mac yet, but I will say that it seems like a large portion of mac sales are because it’s “cool” to have a mac. The mac ads seem to just reinforce the idea that macs are the “cool” thing to have. And the fact that any of the black mac books even sell is just retarded. Computers as a fashion accessory? Ok, I guess that’s fine… as long as it doesn’t effect performance or future advancements of the hardware and software.

I started playing around with ActionMailer a few days ago. I followed the wiki tutorial without much trouble. Well, with the illusion of no troubles. When I started testing the code, nothing seemed to work. I didn’t receive any of the emails that ActionMailer appeared to be sending. My development.log looked fine, my ActionMailer configuration seemed ok, but still nothing worked. It felt a bit like stumbling around a dark room, stubbing my toes on various peices of furniture, but unable to find a light switch. Well here’s your light switch:

ActionMailer::Base.raise_delivery_errors = true

Drop that line in your development.rb and you’ll see all the errors generated by ActionMailer. The wiki tutorial doesn’t mention this. The fact that errors are turned off by default seems a little weird to me… I personally would think that errors would be on by default.

I picked up a DS Lite today at Target as part of their “early release“. Here are some first impressions.

So a little background first: I’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate gaming in to my ever busy schedule. Historically I’ve been a big PC gamer, but I’ve found that a lot of PC games tend to lend themselves to long gaming sessions. Just the amount of time it takes to start up my gaming pc, load a game, and actually get to playing (and having fun) is ridiculous. So I’ve been thinking about going back to console gaming (the last console I bought was the PS1), but I want to wait for either the Wii or the PS3. In the meantime I decided to try the DS. I’m hoping that the games will be easy to pickup when I have a few minutes, and I’m also hoping that they’ll be new and interesting.

Size: Small when it’s closed. Easy to carry around. Not small enough to carry around in my pocket (anything bigger than an ipod is too bulky for me to pocket).

Finish/Case: The outside finish definately reminds me of Apple, nice and shiney but quickly gets smuggy. The plastic on the inside (around the controlls and screens) is different than the outside, it’s a flat white that feels cheap in comparison to the outside finish.

Screens: Nice and bright. The bottom screen doesn’t look too much worse than the top dispite the fact that it’s a touch screen. You can’t change the screen brightness without going back to the DS main menu, so you can’t change the brightness mid-game. The touch screen seems accurate and fast to respond.

Sound: Great! The dual speakers offer much better sound than my GB Advance SP.

Controls: They feel a little bit cramped. I only noticed it when playing Mario Kart where you have to hold down a single button for long periods of time. Not any worse than other handhelds I’ve played (haven’t tried the PSP though). Definately not as comfortable as your standard console controller.

Battery Life: Not sure yet… still going after a few hours of playing.

So far I think I give it an 8.5-9 out of 10. The only things I don’t like so far is the cheapish feeling plastic on the inside, the crappy screen brightness control, and the slightly cramped feeling controls when playing certain games. I’m curious to see how the bottom screen holds up. I’ve seen some regular DS’s that have touch screens that look like scratching posts. So far I’m really liking it though.