What I’m mainly looking forward to is not the belt or the rank, but the acknowledgement that I’ve improved. I’d still probably do karate anyway – it’s fun and it’s the only thing in about the last 10 years besides BMX that I’ve actually stuck with in terms of exercise, and I haven’t stuck with BMX as a form of exercise since the necessity went away.

In a little bit I have to go and pick up Shaina from her new job at Walmart, and I’ll probably pick up a case of bottled water while I’m there – it’s ridiculously hot and humid today, and I’m going to be in a stuffy building sweating and exercising for probably three hours. We have a whole house water filter, but Montpelier municipal water still tastes terrible since our water softener exploded one winter… so I find it’s just as easy to pick up some bottled water every so often and leave it in the fridge at the Dojo.

I’ve been nursing a sprained toe or two for the last few weeks, so hopefully the promotion goes off without a hitch.

Turns out at least one of our neighbors’ phone is out too. The phone I could care less about, but not having the DSL really puts a hurting on us. I called up AT&T and filed a trouble ticket, as did the neighbor, and they said they’d be out Tuesday. I wasn’t exactly expecting emergency assistance, but Tuesday’s friggin’ ridiculous. Lucky our neighbor saved us the trouble and yelled at some poor customer service rep until they agreed to send someone out tomorrow – hopefully it gets fixed fast, because meatspace is terribly boring when it’s all you have.

We decided to spend some time outside hacking out some of the shrubbery that makes our place look like a jungle. I put the kids to work helping me out, and we got a pretty sizable pile out on the street which I’m sure the city workers will be thrilled to see (considering they probably have one of the most cushy jobs in the entire county, they sure bitch a lot). We’ve still got a ton more as well, but I’m figuring on doing more tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll post some pics of the pile.

The first thing I don’t particularly care for is how stupid hot the damn thing gets when you’re using it a lot. I’m thinking it might be the CDMA radio in it, because certain apps make it heat up fast while others you can use the thing for ages with minimal heat. The MSN app I was using for example, 30 minutes and it was uncomfortable.

As I write this post, however, the heat is barely noticeable. Not that the WordPress app isn’t fraught with it’s own difficulties…

Another issue is that two of it’s features are apparently broken. I can’t get the smart profile (turn the phone on it’s face to silence), nor the double tap to silence to work at all. Probably for the best, as some folks have had it never ring again after that (might be third party app related).

Finally, the firmware on the X from Motorola is patently terrible. Work is in progress for folks to get custom ROMs to boot, but not yet. I rooted my X simply to remove some of the bloatware – I am never going to pay for Blockbuster or city ID so I should be able to remove those fucking icons, right?

Apparently the X benchmarks a good bit slower than it should too, likely the remnants of Blur on a non-blur phone are to blame for that, or perhaps the lack of FrozenYoghurt. I’ve not really experienced any lag though, for the most part it’s a dream to use.

Still though, an option for vanilla android would be nice from companies who keep polluting the homogenous experience with their own UI tweaks. If I can get an almost vanilla Froyo on it, and add apps from there, I think I’ll be much happier.

My brother in law was petty psyched about the “places” feature, after I showed him how it worked… he spent about ten seconds screaming “KFC” at it, before I showed him “places”. Out with the family on that road-trip Branson vacation, and the needle’s starting to point to E? Bring up the gas station finder, complete with compass directions and the ability to plug it straight into turn by turn navigation. That’s cool.

The camera leaves a lot to be desired, the advertised 8MP had me thinking I might never use my DSC again… but alas, no. The mechanical shutter is nice but it’s still very obviously a camera-phone. The panoramic view thing worked pretty well even though I tried it in really low light… I can’t see me using very often though unless I magically figure out how to work the camera into taking decent pics. The flash also seems to wash out the images too easy, particularly with macro shots – also my main gripe about my DSC.

The GPS radio bug is pretty fucking annoying too – in fact for a while there I was genuinely tempted to call up and inquire about exchanging the phone because of the heat and battery issues. Turning the GPS off is a pain in the arse, but at least it can go more than five hours without a charge.

Update:I’ve played with the GPS, and while I can “reproduce” the bug, I don’t notice it in terms of battery life. I’m getting about 13-15 hours between charges out of it, and I mostly can’t put it down. I got about 5 hours of MP3 playback out of it with around 50% battery – turn off MP3s and the battery drain flatlines as expected, despite the fact the debug screen’s “running” is pegged at 100%.

One really good thing about the software, Swype. It takes a little getting used to, and there are a lot of small tricks you pick up over time (like swyping up to capitalize a first letter) but the most important thing is to just relax and scribble. It’s border-line creepy the regularity with which swype can figure out what you intended to say, so don’t sit and watch each word get entered… just go nuts scribbling with a light touch as fast as you can and then make a second sweep through to fix any errors.

It also works great with your thumb – the other day I managed to bust out a tweet using only my thumb with swype while I had my arms full of groceries waiting in line to check out. I was pretty impressed with how few errors I made and how easy it was to pilot the device with my least-deft minor digit.

Other minor grievances with this phone I suspect may be android specific platform wide issues. I would frequently leave my WinMo handset plugged in via USB to conserve battery life – no can do with the Droid. Unless you chose to have it on USB only, android OS will unmount the SD card while your PC has access to it. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for that, but it stops any custom alerts from working. Maybe there’s a way to store those alerts on the phone’s memory instead and avoid this issue, but I, was quite annoyed to miss an email by about ten minutes because of it.

On the whole though, this phone is pretty kick-ass, and I’m not really upset I didn’t get a full QWERTY with it.

It’d be nice if there was a way of filtering slideshows out the way Flickr lets you tag screenshots so they can be excluded. Hey dumbasses: this is a video, this is fucking not. In fact, dear reader, if you want an exercise in anger management… try to find an actual video clip of the famous Simpsons song “See My Vest” that isn’t some dumbass slideshow.

Which brings me to my next rant – the re-posts. It’s not enough that one douchebag puts exactly 11 images to 60 seconds of audio and calls it a “video”, it’s that two hundred and fifty other dumbasses will come along and think they can do the same thing better, assuming they don’t just out and out steal it and re-post it verbatim.

I guess that’s my major gripe about YouTube, is that people think they’re contributing stuff when they’re really not. Now I’m not perfect, most of my contributions are formulaic gaming music videos which are now missing the audio. Exactly one of them is informational, and another video I uploaded is black and white footage of my dog. I’m not exactly an internet superstar, and I don’t pretend to be.

But people who re-post shit like a certain auto-tuned “song” so they can get views to their channel instead of the person who should be rightfully collecting them; to the 13 year old who thinks they’re going to be famous for doing nothing but cursing on camera, and to their parents who think it’s okay and/or that anyone other than internet pedophiles are interested in what your kid has to say; and of course to the people who post slideshows in the guise of video…

… go die in a fire.

We have about 2/3rds of the ceiling done, and we have the materials to do the rest, but the issue is that I lack a ladder or scaffolding or some other mechanism by which I can safely complete the task.

We’re also wanting to get the walls done, but we lack raw materials for that (drywall sheets mostly)… I’m planning on buying a few sheets here, a few sheets there until it’s done. Then I brought up the subject of sconces.

We need to figure out where we want them, which is easier said than done. Every time we approach the subject of sconces, the topic of conversation always drifts to which particular type we want to put in… “something tiffany”, “gaudy”, blah blah blah. Hours have been wasted either standing in the lighting aisles of Home Depot and Lowes, or pouring over catalogs like Kichler lighting.

But the fact is none of that matters just yet – I just can’t put the drywall up without wiring the holes for them first. We can pick whatever kind we want, or just cover the wires up with wire nuts and electrical tape and wait 10 years to buy them – but I need to know where they need to go before any work can get done.

I think we’ve finally reached a consensus though.

Those people gasping in silent awe at the trailer for MW2, saying things like “fucking awesome”? Show them real footage of war with similar events, telling them that it’s real footage and not a game nor a movie, and you’ll find very few people who you get the same reaction out of.

The fact is that it’s a game – no matter how realistically it might portray you sticking a semtex to someone’s head, the average well-adjusted human being is going to comprehend that it’s still a game. It is not the same thing as sticking semtex to someone’s head in real life, and almost everyone knows that. The few who don’t? They need help anyway, and yanking the violent video games away from them isn’t going to stop them (we had serial killers and mass murderers long before video games came along).

Tying the popularity of violent video games into the deplorable manner in which journalism presented the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is just silly. The reason for the presentation (with the missile stats screens reminiscent of a football game) was to maintain public support for what was essentially a corporate money-grab on contracts work for the rebuilding and security process. They’re about as related as Tiger Woods’ extra-marital activities are to the latest EA Sports golf title.

Find the most top-ranked (in terms of XP and hours) MW2 player online, assuming he has no prior military experience, and drop him into basic training and then into Iraq, and I’d wager he’d fare about the same as every other kid who left his summer of dog days and wound up in basic. The idea that he (or she, to be fair) would be better prepared for real warfare in any measurable sense after playing a video game is just silly.

It’s just a game. When I “kill” someone in an FPS, they come back. Maybe it’s in 10-15 seconds (Call of Duty, most common modes), maybe it’s next round (SOCOM, most common modes)… but they come back. Try selling a massively multi-player warfare game where if a person was killed, they couldn’t ever play again… see how well that sells. Heck, try even selling one where a person’s character grows with XP (a la MAG), but when they’re killed once they have to re-roll, I bet that doesn’t even sell so great.

For all the talk about “realism”, the fact is that that’s basically the last thing gamers want. Arguably the most realistic multi-player mode on MW2 – Hardcore Search and Destroy – isn’t, from my experience, on of the most popular modes. The game enforces hardcore rules, which removes the HUD and makes bullet damage more accurate to real life scenarios (two in the chest with most weapons is enough to stop almost anyone), and when you die it makes you sit out until the next round. I happen to like it, but sometimes I have a rough time finding a game of it. Most gamers don’t want that realism to get in the way of the fun.

Awesome graphics, realistic physics, that feeling that you just might be the hero that turns the tide of war – that’s the realism gamers want. When it gets a little too real, it ruins it… I would also hazard a guess that a fair portion of the MW2 audience isn’t even pro-war, so I think drawing any kind of social commentary out of the fact that MW2 is one of the most popular is taking some pretty grand leaps.

So I decided to call up on Thursday, after Sabriena watched one too many videos on the “Droid Does” website. The glowing red allure of giant oversized novelty pulse oximeters had their tractor beam trained on her, and she was really excited about the idea of it. She couldn’t understand why I wanted one, and then she watched the videos of all the neat stuff they can do.

So I’m on the phone with a Verizon rep, knowing full well even if I ordered them that day, it wouldn’t ship until the 4th… then I was told no way, no how, I would have to wait until the 10th to re-up my contract. I can’t order the phone right then and jump the inevitable queue, I would have to actually call back on the tenth.

I was a little bummed, but today I decided to call back and bug them again – maybe being a little closer to my freedom date they’d be more inclined to put the lasso back on me for another two years. Today, they offer me some “special upgrade offer” where I can order one today and blah blah blah. Awesome, so I place the order – and now they’re back-ordered until the 18th.

So I’m a little butt-hurt I’ve got to wait an extra two weeks because they took three days to offer me a deal that any salesman worth his salt would have offered someone who was two weeks away from being able to switch carriers anyway.

I spent about an hour and a half out there, and I was actually amazed at how cool it was in there. It was damp though, and there were a lot of bugs around, but I didn’t get eaten up that bad. I’m gonna take the bug repellant next time, anyway.

I came home and chilled in front of my computer, mucking about with Mumble stuff for a bit. My screen started doing this going black for a half second, like the vga cable is loose or something – I hope the damn LCD isn’t going out, I like it too much.

As far as Mumble stuff going, I started putting together a clean version of Mutter. It’s a CLI administration tool I’ve been writing as a project to learn C++, and it’s slow going… I keep falling back into the same old way of doing things, and it’s probably pretty dumb doing them that way in C.

I did manage to learn about IO manipulators tonight, which is good because now I think I can mostly ditch printf() when I’m writing C++. So far so good, it compiles without any warnings, and I think it’s reasonably stable.

My goal is to get it compiled as a static linux binary, and included in the static linux server package, so that folks who can’t get Ice bound to PHP or Python for some reason can still have a method to do trivial management of their Murmur. There are many people out there who don’t need a full-blown web interface (most of it can be done from inside the Mumble client), they just might need to reset a user’s password or something from time to time.

So far I have a method to list virtual servers, methods for viewing and setting configuration directives, and that’s about it. I at least want to get the ability to trivially edit user accounts, and possibly a method to add/delete virtual servers, and then I’ll start working on cleaning up all the bugs.

Problem is, it apparently messed with his ability to sleep on his own. It used to be he could lay on the bed for hours, waking up to eat, then going back to sleep before waking up a little bit later in a cheerful and chipper mood.

Lately, he’s been the most cranky kid ever, and apart from a few hours ago when he finally went down for some real sleep, he slept a grand total of about 90 minutes today in three separate naps. I even tried laying next to him with the laptop, which helped him sleep for a while but then he was up, bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

On the whole though, it still amazes me how much of a happy little kid he is, even when he’s tired as a dog.

By the time we got back… whew. It was like an armpit. We spent probably a good twenty minutes sitting in the driveway under the shade of a nice big tree, and I even tweeted about how nice it’d be to have some outdoor furniture like a picnic table, and then a couple of nice laptops so we could just chill outside most of the day under a tree.

We came inside and I got something to eat, and began the long and arduous process of waiting for the thunderstorms to arrive and cool us off. They’re still not here, but I get the suspicion they’re not far away.