Avatars

On the Wii, you can make a Mii look like yourself fairly easily, largely because Miis are so simple and cartoony. Avatars might also be cartoony, but the quality level is a bit too high, and thus it’s hard to create a spitting image of yourself. With that said, I did set my avatar up to look pretty pimp, so we’ll see. The “usefulness” of these will largely depend on how games utilize them, of course. The Xbox needs its Wii Sports or Big Brain Academy.

Netflix

Yeah, couldn’t get that working. Guessing the servers were overloaded. This seems to be the issue with several Xbox services. Didn’t MSFT expect the onslaught?  Not impressive.

General dashboard

A lot easier and quicker to use than the oh so hip “blades” interface was. I like it.

Hard drive install

While it would have been awesome to install the games to the hard drive and never have to worry about using the disc again, reality is — and understandably so — a bit different. You will still need the disc in the drive to play the game, even though everything runs from the hard drive. This, if nothing else, should speed up loading times quite a bit.

Overall

Ten minutes in isn’t a lot, but so far I’m impressed. A good reminder to go back to Fable 2!

Probably one of the most puzzling and unsettling stories ever written, those two lines written by Fredric Brown are actually a short-story within a short-story.

And while the 1948 text obviously is awesome, I have to admit I’m fond of this take on it:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door…”

Very interesting. If the lock is on the inside, what is the man trying to keep out? If the lock is on the outside, what locked him in there?

While both stories are based on age-old variations of ghost stories, the (probably) earliest published version of it was written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the late 1800s:

“A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.”

Notes should be taken by those who write all the crap horror we see in theaters these days.

Vista, while having some nice features, is not a good product. For being a six or whatever years in the making OS update, it hasn’t as much improved on XP, but made it more cumbersome to use.

And with Apple getting a cool kid on the block type attention over the last few years, thanks to the iPod and iPhone (and through that their computers and OSs,)  it came as little surprise that Microsoft went with cool advertisers Crispin Porter + Bogusky to change people’s perception of Microsoft.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky are in my opinion overrated. The BK King? I swore off Burger King because of it. Their Volkswagen commercials weren’t much better. And their Microsoft commercials? If this is how they’re trying to overtake Apple as the coolest kid on the block… No…

The Seinfeld commercials/mini-movies were, of course, a gigantic mistake. Sure they’re funny, and Seinfeld and Gates both come off really well, but so what? It makes no difference for Microsoft. Even if it does make people talk about the company, it is not something that will do any good for them. They’re already talked about. In fact, the only thing I can see benefiting from the ads would be the Gates Foundation, as Bill Gates comes off likable enough in the movies. Of course, they were all pulled a few days ago, a major major slap in both Microsoft and Crispin Porter’s faces.

The “I am a PC” ads are worse, as they try to sell Windows by responding to the “I am a Mac” commercials yet just make PC users seem like followers and not individuals. In other words the opposite of the message the ad makers are trying to convey. In many ways it is a good example of how Microsoft is a company of followers and not innovators. If they were to respond to Apple, they should not have done it directly, but rather make something equally eye-catching with an individual voice. I give this campaign two weeks before it’s pulled.

Regardless. Even if the ads hadn’t failed miserably, the fact stands that Microsoft’s flagship product, Vista, sucks the big one. The only way to fix people’s perception on that is to better the product. It doesn’t seem like that is in the cards though.

C’est la vie.

As for the iPhone itself, my one line review goes something like this: The iPhone is best thing to have happened to anybody ever.

In somewhat of an interesting coincidence, Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event took place today. And as you all (all two of you) are interested in my takes on everything, here are my opinions about the announcements!

iTunes 8: Nice. The “Genius” feature, in particular, is useful when you have a lot of music, much of which you forget to listen to. I have that problem.

New iPod nano: Well, I certainly don’t need one, but it sure is a sexy piece of hardware. Seeing that it’s a big money maker for Apple, the update makes sense. I’d upgrade to it if I used the old “fatty” version.

New iPod touch: Probably nice if you don’t want an iPhone. Seems a bit pointless to me, but whateva’.

Portable games: Eh… I was never much into handheld gaming.

iPhone 2.1: Probably awesome had they bothered to actually talk about the damn thing other than “bug fixes.”

Jack Johnson: Really? Highest selling male artist in iTunes? Really?!

One more thing! Oh apparently not.

Overall: People will say they expected more, but really… It was an iPod event, how much new shit can you put in it?

A few weeks ago something happened however. All of a sudden i got about 1,500 uniques in a day, most of them on the aforementioned Mario post. Huh. Turned out A Whole Lotta Nothing, had found the post interesting enough to post a link to it, which, of course, was cool. For those not familiar with the blog, it’s from the dude behind MetaFilter, so it gets a good hit ratio apparently.

Anyway, the hits flattened out again. Then…

What the…? Turns out kottke — the world’s 4th most powerful blog (whatever that means) according to Guardian — also made a mention about the experiment. After that the link started spreading, and sites like Kotaku wrote about the experiment.

So huh… The experiment was, of course, never meant to be taken seriously. It was just an excuse to drink some vodka (Vikingfjord, for the persnickety Mario Karter) and play a video game. It’s kinda hilarious that some people are getting up in arms about the technicalities behind the whole thing. Like: “No, no, no, you need a control, who plays w/o drinking, because people will get better at playing the course as they play it several times.” Well, no, we’ve played the course so many times I doubt we could get much better or worse at it at this rate. But whatever.

Fo realz yo.

And exactly why do they dress like hippies, look like hippies, act like hippies while claiming they don’t like the comparison. It’s like hipsters bitching about the hipster term.

They really just make me want to go listen to the type of music they’re ripping off.

For those interested in these kinda things, here are some fun filled facts about the site:

• As the site isn’t overly complex content-wise, my goal was to keep the design modern, and ignore older browsers, resolutions, etc.
• This is Web 2.0.9 people! All Over Your Faces should really only be viewed in newer browsers, like Firefox 3, Safari 3, Opera 9.5, or IE 7 in a “high” resolution. Various elements’ positioning and use of transparent PNGs certainly wouldn’t work in IE6 at least.
• All the musings are posted to Twitter, and the site pulls them over hourly. Live updating from Twitter is kinda hopeless as, y’know, it’s down all the time. Twitter also has a 140 character limit, so the musings will always be short.
• In fact, you’ll probably stop reading newspapers and just live by our musings from now on.
• iluvspokane was developed to be very modular, which lets other sites hook into its code easily. All Over Your Faces uses a few of its classes, as well as its templating system, which made developing the back-end a fairly quick process.