Extra Pepperoni

I have a compulsive personality, I like finishing things, and I enjoy computer games. I have developed a simple set of rules to avoid blowing all my time gaming.

1. I test games written by friends. I only have 3 friends who have written games. Howard wrote Spectre and Gridz, but was distracted running an ISP for a while. Andrew wrote Battle-Girl but we’re no longer in touch. Peter wrote Greebles, but doesn’t currently appear to have any plans for further game development. So I haven’t spent much time on friends’ games in several years, although beta testing gets pretty involved. I also played several Delta Tao games, and might even try Return to Dark Castle.
2. I play coin-op games. The sad thing here is that for years as a kid, I wished I could afford to spend a lot of time playing arcade games, but didn’t have lots of money to blow on it. Now that blowing a roll of quarters isn’t a big deal, I don’t have much interest or time, and don’t live near any arcades.
3. I play Marathon; I played through Marathon 1-3, and Halo 1 (really Marathon 4). Last week I bought an Xbox 360 (my first gaming console ever) to play Halo 2 & 3 — I’m waiting for Lyman’s extra 20gb Xbox hard drive and VGA cable so I can get started with Halo 2. Unfortunately I’m not good at FPS games, so it will probably take me a long time to work my way through Halo 2 and then Halo 3. My intention is to sell the Xbox after Halo 3, assuming it has any resale value at that point.
4. I don’t sweat the small stuff. When Luxor came out, I spent a few hours playing the demo, then deleted it. On the Xbox, I’m playing demos and freebies (which tend to come with 1-3 sample levels — pretty anemic) while I wait for the hard drive so I can play Halo 2. Halo 2 was only released for Xbox, not 360, so it needs to download patches from Xbox Live and store them on a hard drive; the 256mb flash card that came with mine is inadequate.

These rules keep me from sinking my life into video games. Also general lack of time, especially as a parent.

Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone 3G would be “Twice as fast. Half the price”.

Ever since Om Malik’s interview with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega, people have been noticing and commenting on the fact that this ignores the mandatory 2-year AT&T contract, and in fact iPhone 3Gs will generally cost more, thanks to the higher monthly fees.

Unfortunately, Amy doesn’t want my original $400 iPhone — perhaps a friend who can’t justify the 3G charges will buy it for $100.

The $300 16gb iPhone 3G will be worth the money for me — I spend a significant amount of time each day waiting for pages to load, and still take a Treo 650 & Bluetooth GPS unit on driving trips. But I’m disappointed in Apple for choosing a clearly misleading catchphrase for a product which doesn’t need deceit and customer confusion to sell well.

I don’t use SMS much, but I do sometimes, and I don’t want to worry about the astronomical per-message costs, so I like the $5/month flat rate plan. And I certainly want the $30/month unlimited 3G data plan.

Fortunately, I’m now able to drop back from the 900-minute/month plan I upgraded to, down to the base 450-minute/month plan, which will save $20/month, and nicely offset the additional $15/month for unlimited 3G & 200 SMS.

Now that AppleCare has failed me, and the iPhone isn’t as much of a hardware investment, and I don’t walk outdoors across campus (drops on carpet are much less destructive than on asphalt or concrete outside), I’ve decided not to purchase AppleCare or a case for my new iPhone (my 11-month-old plastic incase protector is falling apart, and kept the iPhone from fitting in any dock). I like the idea of leaving the iPhone charging in its dock overnight, rather than lying on a night table.

So with the new iPhone, I’ll save $70 on a 2-year AppleCare contract and $30 for the case. This is enough to pay for MobileMe service. Hopefully it will be solid, as opposed to the current .Mac service, based on the unreliable iSync.

I wonder how much turn-by-turn GPS with spoken directions will cost on the iPhone. I know TomTom and Garmin are quite interested, and Google Maps can do real-time driving GPS without spoken directions — I don’t know what the iPhone options will be, though.

I have a couple large questions. First, how well will MobileMe work? Second, how much will turn-by-turn GPS with spoken directions cost? Hardware GPS units are in the several-hundred-dollar range, while Google offers free or cheap GPS with directions but no speech. I’m looking forward to seeing what is available using the iPhone SDK.

I’ll have a much faster iPhone (and probably OpenSSH — hooray!), and next time an attractive upgrade rolls around, I won’t have $500 invested in the previous generation.

To sum up, I’ll save $20/m on extra minutes, and pay an additional $15/m on 3G data & SMS. I’ll save $100 on protection, and pay $100/year on MobileMe. If things don’t change over the next 2 years, I’ll end up paying $40 more, which isn’t bad, but also isn’t “Half the price.”

Today I tried to take out an earring, but when I grabbed the front and back, the front fell off. This posed a serious problem, as I couldn’t get a enough of a grip on the remaining post to pull the back off.

I went downstairs, but couldn’t see the post. I tried pulling it back through my ear, but it wouldn’t budge — the front of the post has a wider flat surface, which the earring figure was welded too. This was too big to fit through the hole. Bad news!

Fortunately, I was eventually able to push on the back enough to get the flat surface back out of the hole and out of my ear, where I grabbed it with the pliers from my swiss army knife. Then it was straightforward to pull the back off.

When Amy mentioned to Joyce (of Scarce) that she now has a blog, Joyce was amazed and impressed at how cutting-edge Amy is. There’s definitely a geographical factor here, because at my picnic earlier the same day, we figured out that of the 6 adults and Julia present (all Brooklynites), every single one of us has a blog.

Devjani’s is firewalled. Julia’s Journal runs on hand-crafted HTML rather than blogging software, but that’s because it dates back to mid-2002; I will move it over at some point. Sharon has two. In addition to Extra Pep, I edit Securosis.

• http://www.mscrochety.com/
• http://ceolaf.blogspot.com/
• http://cmss1971.wordpress.com/
• http://typewrittenteacup.blogspot.com/
• http://twhos.blogspot.com/

Being the compulsive sort, it bugged me whenever I missed an episode of a TV show I watched (I used to watch a lot of TV; now not much). Similarly, it bothered me that I didn’t have complete sets of the comics I read — they were both hard to find and expensive, especially since I almost never started at the beginning.

Inspired by Ernie Cline, I’ve recently been watching Airwolf. It hasn’t aged well, and was never great storytelling, but it’s still enjoyable. And it’s nice to see as a coherent whole over weeks, rather than scattered across years with commercial interruptions. I’m in the middle of season 2, and will skip season 4 (I don’t think I ever saw it, fortunately); don’t know about season 3. Perhaps I’ll watch The Fall Guy next!

Nowadays, with the Internet, back issues of comic books are pretty easy to find. I’ve completed a few series that were missing issues, such as Badger crossovers, Dynamo Joe, and Tailgunner Jo. I’d love to collect various other series, but a full run of X-Men would be prohibitive — both in terms of money and time to read them all!

I was pleased to discover Marvel made several of their more popular titles available to GIT, who released them on DVD. Unfortunately, the license was terminated in favor of Marvel’s online service, but some DVDs are still available. James gave me Ghost Rider for my birthday, and despite some aggravations (they photographed the open comic books, so there’s dead space around the corners, and didn’t bother to split left & right pages, so it’s too awkward to read in single-page portrait mode) which make the comic harder to read than it should be, I’m enjoying the old Ghost Rider issues. It’s amazing what a loser Johnny Blaze originally was — he’s an idiot (sloppy writing), a coward, a regretful devil dealer, and not really faster or more skillful than gang members. As time has gone on, and Marvel has super-sized its characters, Ghost Rider and his cycle have gotten faster, stronger, less human, and ironically much more innocent.

At Wheaton, I helped found the Progressive Alliance, a student political club. I don’t remember most of the members (in fact I no longer recall the names of most of my classmates), but Kirsten Cappy was one of the heads — one of two co-presidents, if I recall correctly — and Steve Amster (a good friend to both of us) got me involved.

As the nerdiest Progressive, I ended up laying out The Serious Shit in PageMaker. Articles were of course always late, so I remember having to shorten articles I’d just stretched out to fill space, in order to fit post-deadline content onto the page (issues were one to two pages, letter or legal sized).

The Shit was posted on the bathroom stall doors, where we had a guaranteed audience with time to read. I don’t recall much more about it, although if Jason Snell revives my old 210mb hard drive, I might get some old issues back — unless they’re on my 6 even older 44mb SyQuest cartridges.

The other thing I recall about TPA & TSS is that my mother convinced me that if I listed “Progressive Alliance” as an activity on my resume, people would decide I was a Communist and not hire me. I don’t remember if I took her suggestion and called it “The Humanist Alliance”, or simply left it out entirely. There was never any question of listing The Serious Shit on the resume — I never interviewed for a job where that would have been a plus.

Fortunately, after my first job at Rockefeller University, I had more relevant things to put on my resume, so the Progressive Alliance dilemma quickly became a non-issue.