I finally got a smartphone on Friday. I took the day off and went and stood around for 20 minutes waiting for the Verizon store to open then got my Droid. Been poking around on it and so far I am impressed.

The most amazing thing is the screen. About the size of an iPhone screen, but with 854x480 resolution. It's quite stunning; I don't believe I've seen anything else with close to that pixel density.

I've got my music and podcasts syncing to it with MediaMonkey, and I've found the right settings for encoding video files for playback there. I did a DVD rip of Brick and it looks quite good and plays back smoothly. The eye-popping resolution helps a lot here.

I've also been trying out some of the cooler stuff like the voice searching. It actually does a surprisingly good job of sorting out contacts versus a normal web search. And I got an app that takes a picture of a barcode and then searches the internet for prices on that product. It's a bit finicky about the capture, but when it gets the capture done it is quite impressive.

The camera is 5MP with flash, but it's not very good at focusing or taking good or fast pictures. I'm hoping a software update will cure it in the future.

Me:
Currently your web method is throwing a 500 when the keyword passed in is only a single space.

What keywords are considered valid for this method?

Response:
Can you provide a sample keyword which is throwing an error.

The Dyson Airblade hand dryer advertises that it uses "purified air". But why is it so important that the air blowing on your hands is more pure than the air that you breathe into your lungs and that surrounds you at every moment?

So back in the day I played Doom 3 when it came out. Decently cool game at the time, but one thing drove me up the wall. At the end of one of the 7 or so footstep noises for the game, there is a very distinctive "click" noise. So whenever you are walking somewhere, you hear the CLICK-CLICK-CLICK ... CLICK CLICK and it drove me crazy enough that I went in to disable it: unpacked one of the game PAKs, copied one of the "good" footstep sounds over the bad one, and re-assembled it.

Some people claimed they did not hear the clicking, and at the time I assumed it was because their install was somehow different and that footstep noise was not played. I assumed that the obnoxious noise would get patched out, or at least be fixed up in the expansion. But after buying the ID super pack from Steam and giving the Doom 3 expansion a whirl, the clicking was back! I couldn't believe it. As I no longer felt like fiddling around with the game PAK files, I uninstalled.

But a month or so ago I took the teenager audio test. I apparently can very clearly hear high pitched noises that normally only teenagers can hear. Looking back on it, I figure the Doom 3 footstep clicking noise was probably out of the hearing range of the developers of the game!

(edit) Here's a clip of someone playing Doom 3. Can you hear the click while the guy is walking around?

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Words fail me.

So some people are freaking out over the Win 7 RC expiration. On March 1st, Windows 7 RC will start shutting down every 2 hours. 2 weeks before that, there will be a warning to that effect. On June 1st, it will expire completely.

Apparently it's a low-down money-grubbing nagware feature, and the OS should just lock down completely at some arbitrary date. All these people with their pesky desire to save their critical data, or perhaps their entire life's work, before their OS shuts down? They're just big babies. Being completely unable to access your computer is just so much more user-friendly than having it shut down after a couple hours.

After searching fruitlessly on livejournal's site, I found this Yahoo Pipe that gets posts from all of your friend's journals. You can add the pipe as an RSS feed.

They are most likely going to let him have the seat, that sniveling weasel.

The governor who appointed him was recorded as saying "A senate seat is a fucking valuable thing, you don't just give it away."

I do not want someone stupid or corrupt enough to accept such an appointment in the U.S. senate. I would much rather him fired out of a cannon and into the sun.

(edit) Co-winner of today's sniveling weasel award is Epic Games for saying there will "definitely not" be a PC release of Gears of War 2. Screw you guys!

It was quite fun. I wore my suit for the first time since I got it 3 years ago and I won a couple things:



The L4D superpack. The pieces of paper there have the super-secret key that gives me access to all past and future Valve games on Steam. And the case is really, really nice and signed by like everyone in valve. And I get a tour of Valve's offices. If you want a small or XXL shirt, or a L4D hat just let me know and you can have one. Thankfully the I Hate Vans and I Hate the Woods shirts are in my size! Also let me know if you'd like a copy of L4D or the Orange Box for the 360 or PC.

Also:



I never knew I wanted one until I saw it.

They are for emergencies only!

(yes I put them there)

Update: Someone has no sense of humor and removed them already. :(
Or maybe they just love jam?