Edgefactor

Black
(From Criterion and EA)

BLACK is a new first person shooter by Criterion. It tries to walk to line between a realistic military shooter (like Splinter Cell or the Rainbow Six games) and a slayers bloodbath blaster (like the old Doom or Halo). There are not many slow moments in the game and the graphics are quite good. But really, that’s to be expected from a big budget title these days.

The problem with Black is that it is annoying. From the opening scene to the final missions it’s like somebody thought of a decent idea for a game and then decided to do everything possible to make that game annoying.

The Site

I was excited about iWeb. The process of converting something I make up in Illustrator into a functional web page is beyond me. Dreamweaver is a bit too complex for me, image slices make me frightened, and everything else just doesn’t seem to cut the cake. So I thought, yeah, iWeb will be great. Apple makes good, easy to use products. I was largely wrong about the good part.

For reference, you can take a look at the page I made for this review.

See if you can decide which one is the Wal-Mart lawyer and which is the lawyer representing the workers...

…the touching story of a hard-luck, small town lawyer who stood tall against a team of high-priced, big-city legal vipers. A man with nothing to lose, and everything to gain. A man who pulled himself together one last time to fight the most important legal battle of his career.

Suing the pants off of Wal-Mart.

Ok, so I’ll be honest. I don’t know anything about the two lawyers pictured in this story. All I know is that the guy on the right, the one trussed up like some sort of cross between Matlock and Yosemite Sam, represented a bunch of California Wal-Mart workers who claimed they didn’t get their 30-minute lunch breaks.

Honestly, the picture just cracked me up.

“Now you look here young man, what all y’all did to them thar’ workers just t’wasn’t right…”

Moo.

I recently redecorated my laptop. You know, some new paint, put down new floors, changed the wallpaper, etc.

Ok, so mostly it was the wallpaper. Thank goodness for Pixelgirl. If you’re tired of staring at the same old boring crap, do yourself a favor and check out some of those wallpapers.

I have about 15 of them on rotation on my iBook.

P.S. Yes, there is some more real content coming. I’m currently working on a book review and may do an Xbox game or two here soon as well.

Fear

This Halloween we thought that instead of the normal ghosts and goblins, we would carve things that truely frighten the American People. So we came up with some phrases that should truely frighten the average trick-or-treater over the age of 30. You can view the whole set over at flickr.

What do you mean my AppleCare doesn't cover against the horrible scratches?

Recently, every time one of my friends, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, or clergy-people have decided to drink the white and silver Koolaid, one of life’s most enduring and difficult questions has been presented to me:

To AppleCare or not to AppleCare?

Slings and arrows aside, I have actually given this question a reasonable amount of thought. Upwards of 15 minutes at least. Eventually I came to the following profound and potentially Earth-shattering conclusion:

The AppleCare Protection Plan (APP), like most “product protection plans,” is basically a scam. I’m sure it’s tremendously profitable for Apple. I’m also sure that if anyone ever gets around to posting a comment on here, it will be to refute my argument with extensive quantities of anecdotal evidence. Oh well.

Hello Owl

Due to the infinate unfairness of the world, I am seperated from my girlfriend by a distance of three states.

Despite this distance, using the miraculous nature of iChat and the internet, I was able to hold a conversation with her stuffed owl.

It's freaktacular!

It’s 1995 and all across America violent crime is way up. During the last ten years, Americans have been witness to a seemingly never-ending spike towards unprecedented, nay catastrophic levels of crime and violence. Criminologist James Alan Fox predicts teen homicides will increase anywhere from 15% to 100% in the next decade. The future is bleak, the end is nigh, and the sky is quite possibly about to rain down on everyone’s head.

So what happened next caught everyone by surprise. Violent crime began to plunge so rapidly and so universally that by the year 2000, the murder rate in this country was at it’s lowest level in 35 years. So what happened? Why was everyone so wrong with their predictions? How can we show, statistically, that professional sumo wrestling in Japan is rigged? Economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner set out to answer these questions and many more in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.