Fuck the equine

As have many people around the world, I’ve been watching the Olympics quite a bit recently and I have been struck by how out I place the equestrian events are. (Aside: I feel a rant a-coming, so I will try to be sussinct in order to avoid that.)

To put it simply: The equestrian events have no place on the Olympics.

The Olympics should be about the pinnacle of human achievement. Repeat, HUMAN achievement. Showing how well we can dominate and train another animal is not an achievement. It is the worst form of human hubris. It is not humans competing against humans. It is horse vs. horse.

It is not a sport. It is not human competition. It is pompous and annoying, and should be removed from the Olympics. That is all.

Dammit

Life is annoying me today. Just little things coming together and building on each other until something stupid seems like a major slap in the face.

Things started out well enough. I had to get up really early, but that’s nothing new these days. And of course, to start my dad had a case of the “Big Day Crankys”. He has always had a tendancy to be in the worst moods at the beginning of a big day when we really need to get ready a bit faster and get out. Today, of course, was no different. I woke up and he was complaining about how his kids have no compassion and we don’t understand that it takes him a long time to get up from sitting down and he can’t move that fast. But, the point of it was that he has always gone into the bathroom and disappeared for an hour whenever we need to get going somewhere, be it a move to college or the airport or graduation or whatever. He was fine after we got to the graduation, but it wasn’t the best start to the day.

The graduation ceremony was good, but long and we had to sit through all of the undergrads and others before getting to Tracy’s walk. After that was lunch which wasn’t too bad, just a lot of people around that I didn’t know and didn’t really care about. The annoying thing there was that there was no cell signal so I missed calls from Nadja, and because of the time difference and our schedules, we haven’t had a chance to talk in a couple days.

The next annoyance is the one that tipped everything over. I got back to the hotel and my laptop cable still isn’t here. I called the hotel and it turns out that the cable still hasn’t even been sent out. The full story is that I left my laptop cable in the hotel near the basketball hall of fame in Massachusetts last week. I called them the day after to tell them that I forgot it. They said that they had it at the front desk, so I gave them the address to have them mail it to me while I was here in Florida. This was on Monday. At the time, I was told that my cable was at the front desk. Later I was told that my cable was locked in a closet and the head housekeeper had the only key and she wouldn’t be in until Wednesday. I called back on Wednesday, and they had the cable at the front desk. I gave them the address in Florida again and was told it was being overnighted and someone would call me to let me know what happened. No one called. I called on Thursday, no one knew what was happenning and I was told someone would call. No one called. I called yesterday and had the same thing happen. Finally, today I called and went straight to the Manager. I told him the story, and he told me that the cable still hasn’t even been sent out, and since I’m only in Florida til Tuesday, I gave him my address in Placid to have it sent there. The assistant manager is claiming that he tried to call me twice but I never got any missed calls or messages. Now the manager promised that he would personally oversee it and make sure it gets out, but at this point this is going to make a week and a half that I did not have my computer and so only had limited access to my files, which is really making the job hunt difficult. Bottom line, I am really pissed at this fucking hotel.

So, after all that happens. I update my favorite game on my iPhone and because the game didn’t give me any indication that I needed to enter info into a community in order to have my stuff saved on a server, so I lost hours and hours of gameplay. As I said before, a relatively small thing, but after everything else it just pisses me off all the more.

The Dark Knight

I just got back from seeing The Dark Knight with my sister. I’m still not sure how I feel about the movie. I need time to ruminate and that in itself unsettles me.

iPhone lovin and hatin

So I’ve had a few days to truly test out my iPhone. It has been my main form of Internet, email and entertainment for the last few days. This is mostly due I the fact that I left the power cable for my MacBook in Massachusetts and the battery is dead. Anyway I think I’ve used of enough to put together a proper review, much like every other blogging need in existence.

First of all the iPhone does meet quite a lot of the expectations I had. Going into this I knew that the battery life was weak. I knew that the 2.0 software was buggy. I knew that 3rd party apps had a tendency to crash. And I knew that the GPS and accelerometer could be spotty. I had done my research so I wasn’t expecting the best, but even with those problems the phone isn’t that far off.

Every single problem above, with the exception of battery life, can and theoretically will be fixed or at leasted eased with software updates. My buddy Jesse tells me that even the new version 2.0.1 helps a lot. Though of course I don’t know because my laptop is dead. I’ll update this entry later today after I’ve had a chance to update.

The only problem I’ve come across that I wasn’t prepared for is that the phone tends to become unresponsive at times of high stress, be it installing new apps or playing an intensive game. Another minor annoyance is with the auto correct function of the keyboard. Overall it works beautifully. If you trust the auto correct it will fix your mistyping correctly about 90% of the time, which is a fantastic way to deal with making a smaller keyboard. My problem comes from the auto correcting of swear words. The system will learn based on what words you use frequently but this doesn’t always work right. For example the first couple times I tried to type the word “fuck” it would be auto corrected to “”duck”. “Shit” becomes “shot” and “hell” becomes “he’ll”. Now sometimes it will give me fuck if I type it correctly but if I accidently type fuxk it will be corrected to duck unless I stop it. Like I said, minor annoyance. A bigger problem is the relative lack of spell check. The system I wonderful at picking up typing errors but doesn’t check spelling at all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve misspelled Massachusetts.

Aside from all of that, the phone works perfectly. The phone itself is very intuitive, as are much of the functions of the phone. The only things I needed to check the manual to do were: rearranging the icons on the home screen and focusing the cursor on a specific spot within a word. Everything else could be learned wihout help. Sine people may not like that you can’t control the iPod functions without unlocking the device, unless you use the packaged earbuds which I find never stay in my ears.

The shape of the phone is comfortable in my hand, but it is takin a bit to get used to the squared corners when I am on a call.

Lastly I wanted to mention the apps, because they are probably the best part of the new iPhone, despite their relative instability to the rest of the system. I have downloaded about 40 apps, all but 4 of which were free and I am very pleased with the range and functionality of the software so far. I would like the app store to have some more subcategories to make it easier to browse, because scrolling through 400+ games or 200+ utilities is annoying. Some notable apps are:

1) Aurora Feint. This is a puzzle game that is planned to morph into an iPhone only MMO. The game now is well designed, fun and addictive, though a bit buggy and some of the strategy elements are hard to see at work. The accelerometer plays a wonderful role to change up gameplay. Best of all: Free! For now.

2) Koi pond. Small and simple. Just a virtual koi pond to play with, but it is beautiful and surprisingly relaxing.

3) MLB.com. I’m actually a little disappointed here. This app feels light. It has updating scores and video but no box scores, no standings, no news, and no stars. Good for what it is, but it could be a lot more. As is just bookmark ESPN on your home screen.

4) Super monkey ball. Fun and pretty but the accelerometer is a bit too sensitive and it’s hard to find a neutral position. Plus I can’t seem to save and continue from the middle of a level.

Of course these last 3 are the only apps that I paid for, but I guess I give more leeway to apps that are free. With the free apps it’s just a matter of finding what you like. There are tons of apps out there. My personal favs are: Wordspress, Evernote, Facebook and Movies. Just simple things that I use frequently.

That’s it for now. There will be a brief update after I test 2.0.1 a bit.

Apartment hunting

For the last two days I’ve been wandering Waltham with my dad trying to find an apartment for Naj and I. It has been a long couple days and I think I found the diamond in the rough but now we have to go through background checks and such. Very annoying.

One bright spot has been my new iPhone. And I say this not as a fanboy. This thing has simply made an annoying process much easier. Having google maps in hand while driving around a new town was great. Plus I could email landlords to set up meetings. And best of all, in any down time I could surf craigslist and find more apartments to see, then either call or email easily to set up an appointment. Very nice.

Shame that the phone likely won’t work in Placid, but I’ll manage. It’ll only be a day, then down to Florida, then a few more days and back to Waltham.

Waltham is a nice, if typical, Northeastern town. It’s filled with college kids and hippies. It’s old and can go from nice to shabby block by block, but overall it’s pretty good.

And, I am loving the Massachusetts accent so much!