ed: Thought I had posted this a while back, but apparently I’d left it in draft form. Updated and throwing it out here now.
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I recently recommended a bunch of iphone games as a twitter response so I thought I’d post a more thorough entry here.
Games I’ve got loaded:
- Lux Touch – Risk style game; this is the free version which is good enough for when I get that urge.
- Quordy – Boggle style game; has multiplayer challenges; I should play more, but there’s so many other games.
- Fieldrunners – tower defense; my favorite of the many many TD games that I’ve tried on the iPhone.
- Mecho Wars – turn based strategy game, similar to Advance Wars; I like the art style.
- Tiki Towers – physics puzzler, similar to world of goo, but not as polished.
- Civilization Revolution – port from xbox live. It’s not quite as detailed as the pc version, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
- iBlast Moki – physics puzzler. It’s my new favorite game. I love the art style and the game theme plus level design is fantastic.
- Secret of Monkey Island – classic adventure game
- 2 across – crosswords
- Flight Control – finger drawing / time management game
- Robocalypse – RTS game. ported from nintendo DS
- Uniwar – turn based strategy
- Tris – tetris clone
Games I’ve got an eye on:
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms – koei port!
- Hybrid: Eternal Whisper – action/rpg
- Zenonia – zelda look-a-like
- Catan – official Settlers game, but currently looking clunky
Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a reading frenzy, going through several newish fantasy series. I’ve been avoiding writing anything about them because it’s easier to just say ‘read this’, but I decided I should at least make a short post. I’ve read all of these via Stanza on the iphone. It’s an awesome e-reader that I highly recommend (it’s free).
Update: looks like I’ll just be doing one per post. Haha.
First one I highly recommend is the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. It’s epic, it’s got great characterization, and it’s got some very well thought out magic systems. As I was going through it, everything felt well planned as if driving towards an ultimate goal. I’ve been reading his annotations online at his website and it’s very clear that he’s spent a lot of time working through things to give the maximum impact to the reader.
He’s taken some familiar fantasy tropes and given them some twists. He has created a world where the archetypal fantasy hero has failed (think if frodo had kept the ring) and turned into an evil emperor. There’s some of the other usual fantasy fare like prophecies and magic, but nothing plays out like you would expect at first sight. It just feels logical once you’re done reading.
That logic even touches the several magic systems in play in the book. The main one we’re introduced to is “allomancy”, in which, certain individuals have the ability to “burn” small amounts of ingested metal to give themselves physical abilities. Different metals give different powers like a video game mana system. The actual powers aren’t outlandish, but I was pleased with how he mostly follows the laws of physics and comes up with very creative uses to achieve the feeling of superpowers. The other two systems of magic tie in together quite well as slightly different ways to achieve the same level of powers.
I can’t say enough good things about the series. It kept up a quick pace, never bogging down, but felt complete at the end. The characters changed / progressed. It’s a fairly serious story, but there’s enough jokes to keep things from getting too out of hand. In short, it’s awesome. Read it!
Ok, this was more of a review than I was originally planning. Maybe I’ll get to writing about the other series later.
I don’t think it’s a secret that I love eating pizza. So Laura and I tried making it from scratch a couple weeks ago, but I only got the pictures uploaded recently.
The most important (and only hard) part of the pizza is making the dough for the crust. So I found a thin-crust recipe that we used. I think it turned out ok for our first attempt, but there’s much room for improvement. We didn’t have a pizza stone so we used a cookie sheet. We also tried just putting the pizza directly on the rack to char the bottom after it was on the cookie sheet long enough to firm up.
So we followed all the directions for making the dough and thought we were on the right track. We even got our dough to be a “smooth and silky” ball like in the recipe photo. When I went to split it and shape half of it into a crust, it was way too dry/hard though 
In the end, I had to use a makeshift rolling pin (saran wrapped wine bottle) just to get it into a pizza-like shape. Sadly, by doing so it also was incredibly thin (I believe thinner than it should have been). It did semi-char nicely on the bottom though, but due to the thinness, it also vaguely tasted like a water cracker. There weren’t any air bubbles and it was definitely not chewy.
For our second pizza we went with prosciutto, sauteed mushrooms, and caramelized onions. The crust for this one is quite “rustic” looking as I again had issues shaping it, but didn’t use a rolling pin so the crust was a little thicker. This one had more of a pizza-like crust due to a couple factors I think. Besides being thicker, we also let the dough sit while we topped/cooked/ate the cheese pizza. I think that helped contribute to the air bubbles. Btw, if you read the recipe we used, the instructions never mentioned letting the dough sit to rise, but maybe we should have known? shrug. If we try this recipe again, we’ll definitely let the dough sit next time. I did run across a no-knead recipe that uses a slow rise in the fridge that sounds promising. So I think that’s also on the agenda.
Just in case we failed miserably, as backup, we got a pre-made dough from trader joe’s. Here’s a couple pics of that one being constructed. It was much wetter than our doughs, so that’s also something I will experiment with in the future. It wasn’t as tasty, nor fun though!!
It was a good experiment and I’m definitely interested in figuring out how to improve on our crust. More internet research! Moar!
Ran across this a plugin called SmugWP while trying to decide on the best way to handle adding pictures to my posts. The great feature that caught my eye is that it integrates your smugmug account to wordpress seamlessly. When you go to insert a picture, the plugin inserts a tab for smugmug in addition to the regular options. There’s also lightbox 2 support as well, which creates a very cool overlay effect for viewing pics when you click on them (rather than simply opening it in a new window). Here’s a couple pics from when we were on the mall for Obama’s inauguration. Settings I used were thumbnail for the pic, large lightbox size.
Edit: Thanks Jed for pointing out I actually installed WP-Touch instead of IWphone. haha.
I seem to be more interested in setting my blog up to do cool things, than actually writing about said cool things. One of the plugins I’ve found is called WP-Touch. When it detects the user agent from an iphone or ipod touch, it sends a version of your blog that’s formatted for the iphone. There’s also an option for the visitor to see your blog with the original formatting if they so choose. I’ve included a couple screenshots I snagged while writing this post.
testing automagic twitter creation via wordpress plugin
Just installed the wordpress app for the iPhone. Testing the posting capability. Looks pretty sweet.
Also installed a twitter plugin for wordpress that should automatically create a tweet when I create a blog post. (thanks laura and jed)
So, hopefully everyone got the invite I sent for the bday festivities using anyvite.com (if you didn’t, let me know and I’ll resend). Heard about it via one of Laura’s friends and having messed around with it, I think it’s better than evite by a large margin.
It’s got a sweet new ajax’d interface, account creation is super quick, and there aren’t the annoying ads / hoops that you have to jump through to use it (unlike evite). It’s clearly still in beta so there’s little things that they’re working on (like better privacy controls), but I think the overall package is worth dealing with the little issues.
Oh, when you add the location, it will add the google maps link automatically and when you click on the link, it’ll dynamically place it on the main page. It also has options for adding the event directly to your google calendar via openauth.
It facilitates migration from evite as well with some pretty nifty tools for bringing over guest lists. Also, it has super cute icons!
So, I hope we all switch from evite. woot.
So I keep paying for this site and never using it. Going to try to use the space for thoughts that can’t fit onto twitter.
I’ve managed to import all of my posts from vox (every post dated prior to this one), but boy does sixapart make it difficult and annoying. There’s no export function in vox (which sucks) and after some research, their rss feeds only show 10 entries unless you specify the page number. So I had to pull 10 posts from the rss feed, import to wordpress, repeat, until I was finally done. Then I realized that the vox posts still required a lot of editing by hand to remove vox specific code.
MEH.
Those posts are staying private until they’re presentable.
For me, the word pineapple always makes me think of quake as that was a term associated with grenades. In pineapple express, it refers to weed.
Anyway, thanks to becca for the preview. As my tweet said, the first two story arcs were hilarious while I found the last act lacking. I think it just felt like they ran out of jokes and decided to shoehorn an action sequence onto the movie to wrap things up.
I did super appreciate the little touches and object placement. Two that stood out were the footprints poster in James Franco's place and the bartles & james bottles in red's bathroom.
Sigh, I was trying to post this from my iphone, but I can't figure out how to scroll a textbox up/down. Meh.
Anyway, it's worth seeing for the buddy/weed jokes.
so the volume button on my iPhone sticks. Went to the apple store in fair oaks and they ordered a replacement. So that’ll be coming Monday or Tuesday. Need to deal with backing up my contacts in yahoo I think. Also all the downloadable apps don’t start and power cycling doesn’t seem to fix it. Deleting and re-installing seems to work however. Yay gadgets. I still want to make out with my phone.
Victory! Only had to get up at 5:30am yesterday to get my black 16gb from tysons. Woot!
I want to make out with my phone, it's so awesome. So, anyone have some reccomended apps?
I've already installed:
smugshot (for viewing smugmug galleries of my photos)
city guide (created by wapo and ties into all their reviews)
remote
google
all the google apps
flashlight / mylite (turns it into an expensive flashlight)
sportstap (sports scores)
shazam (music recog)
yelp (restaurant reviews)
boxoffice (movies)
labyrinth LE (game)
tap tap revenge (game)
It's a sad day. I canceled my world of warcraft accounts today.
December the 16th is Beethoven’s birthday if you didn’t know (I mean who doesn’t know that?!). So if you’re in the DC area, you can tune to wgms (104.1 or wgms.com with live feeds) to hear a lot of him mixed in with the traditional holiday crap.
He’s definitely one of my favorite composers and it’s probably a toss up between him and Chopin for most stuff I’ve played. His stuff is so much fun to play, if sort of a pain in the ass to learn. My favorites are all “named” sonatas (do I like them because they’re famous or are they famous because they’re awesome?). I usually tell people that I’d pick what I’d want to learn by whether it’d let me show off or not. And all of these fit squarely within that category – flashy, technical pieces that everyone loves. In the order that I learned them:
- Tempest – This was the first one that I played. I forget how young I was, but I remember not liking it at the time, but I think I’ve changed my mind.
- Pathetique – I love the opening movement. It’s such a shock as the first note slams into you and then goes super quiet before going loud again. Imagine me as a youngish teenager getting to basically play with as much force and contrast as I was capable before suddenly cutting into a quick tempo
- Moonlight – Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard the first movement: it’s beautiful, haunting, blahblahblah. It’s boring as shit to play. On the other hand, no one knows the 3rd movement which is set at a presto! tempo and consists primarily of long runs of arpeggios. This was the first piece where my hands were actually tired after playing. The 3rd movement was also the piece that got me into learning Beethoven in the first place. I was really little when I heard someone perform this at one of the recitals that our piano teacher would hold for all her students and wanted to play it ever since.
- Waldstein – The opening 2 bars are a perfect example of Beethoven’s ability to make music out of a very simple arrangement of 4 notes. It opens with a repeated staccato of chords with no melody! He keeps at it somehow creating a melody out of that mess. Wonderful piece to play, but again your wrists are so tired at the end. The 3rd movement has a beautiful melody and it’s one of my favorite pieces to play. Feature of note is that on your right hand, you’ve got a continuous trill in your thumb and forefinger while the melody moves through the rest of the fingers and even sometimes into the trill fingers. Try keeping that going fast without dropping the trill!
- Appassionata – I’d always wanted to play this piece when I was younger, but it was still out of my ability level. I lost to some dorky russian kid who played this at a competition when I was playing the Pathetique. My consolation was that I didn’t practice 8 hours a day like he did or wear girly gloves before the competition so his hands would stay warm. I still hate him. This is the only piece that I’ve got an mp3 recording of me playing the first movement. Although writing this reminds me that I should get around to converting all the tapes of me playing when I was a kid to digital audio. Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, here’s my recording (if you’ve known me after college, you’ve heard this before). Vox is generating an error when I try to upload it so you just get a link (also it’s really really quiet and I probably need to adjust the volume setting next time when I upload it).
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