So I played it, I finished it, and it was pretty ok!
The story was pretty lackluster. I haven’t played the first game so maybe I’m missing out on some key character development.
The force powers were awesome. I highly enjoyed tossing various bits of the environment around in the midst of combat.
Darth Vader was imposing and a little scary at the start of the game, very reminiscent of his role in the first Star Wars movie.
All in all, worth $20.
I’ve tried almost a dozen TODO list trackers over the years. From text based solutions like TODO.txt or Xavier Shay’s XTDO to fancy-pants GUI solutions like Appigo Todo or Pomodoro App for the iPad to web-based solutions like Toodledo. I’ve also tried enterprise solutions like Jira, or code-based solutions like github issues or redmine or trac.
None of them have ever lasted. I bump into a wall of “it doesn’t quite do enough for me”. I want a todo system that:
Most systems fall down at that first point. None of them have made it through all of them.
Until now.
Flow has changed my expectations of todo tracking. It’s all of those points, all of them! And wrapped in an absolutely gorgeous interface. There are even niceties like a native OSX client that adds an Apple menu icon to easily and quickly drop in new tasks.
I’ve been using their free trial for two weeks now and have been nothing but pleased. I even got a response from their support email within an hour of asking how to do something. They even automatically renewed my first free trial for another two weeks after noticing that I hadn’t really used it yet.
If you have a list of things to get done, and you want to sanely track them. You should definitely give Flow a try.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the angry dome!
Man, that was pretty much the roughest website launch I’ve ever had. You know it’s just perfect when the CEO happens to be pulling up your website in the three minute span of time that the new site is coming up. It’ll just be a few minutes we thought in our naïveté; who will notice? Ha ha!
CEO. Conference room. Pretty much all upper management. Our site. Broken rendering. Yeah.
But it’s launched so woo! It’s better than ever. You can now actually use our site to automatically price business Internet options for any address/phone line in the US. We hit the carrier APIs and pull back the best prices we can get automatically. No need for you to have an account, no personal information required, no sales people calling because you priced an address: just internet pricing data.
Of course there’s no resting here. I have a bunch of ideas for taking the site even further, but I’m once again happy to point folks to broadband.com and say “Yeah, I made that.”
“I am going to bring daddy a light at work and he’s gonna put it in the ceiling and it’s gonna shine so bright that everyone at daddy’s work is gonna dance!” — Edward, three years old
It’s been almost a year since Google announced that they were testing robot cars in California, and that those robot cars had already logged over 140,000 miles of real-world driving. The program quickly expanded into Nevada where Google convinced the state to issue special licenses allowing the operation of the autonomous cars.
A few days ago a Google robot car rear-ended another car at low speed, but the human driver was in control at the time. Silly humans and our organic reflexes. I can only imagine that the robot car’s logs were full of
* APPLY 50% brake pressure.
WARNING: Brakes unresponsive.
* RIGHT TURN 80 degrees
WARNING: Steering unresponsive.
* APPLY 80% brake pressure
WARNING: Brakes unresponsive.
Based on the current rate of expansion, it’ll be another thirty years before robot cars will drive me around. I want to speed that along. Even if robots don’t “get” driving and aren’t as efficient and capable as the best human driver, I am absolutely sure they are better than most drivers most of the time. And they’d be consistent. To quote Short Circuit:
It doesn’t get pissed off. It doesn’t get happy, it doesn’t get sad, it doesn’t laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.
How do we get the robot car adoption rate up? How do we quicken the creation of a commuter’s utopia where we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the delicious combination of mass transit autonomy and personal car convenience? Simple.
Guarantee that no passenger in a robot car will ever get a ticket or be at fault in an accident.
And you’re done.
Ideally I’d go further down the avenue of potential and change car ownership to a subscription model. You wouldn’t actually own a specific car, but subscribe to the availability of a car. At maintenance time, monthly, or whatever; the car hub would send a “new” car to drive to your house and swap out with your current car.
Want to not have to worry about moving your things from the old car to the new? Pay more to be able to schedule a time for your car to drive back to the hub first. There the staff would move everything to the new car and send it on its way.
You now have absolutely reliable personal transportation that drives you wherever you want to go. Put this all into an electric car and we’ll cut back CO2 emissions like it’s not even a thing. Need a big gas car for a road trip? Sure, just schedule it with the hub and it’ll show up on time and ready to go.
But don’t limit this to just road trips. Grocery stores are experimenting with curbside service: you place your grocery order online, drive up to the curb, they load it in, you drive off. Combine that with a robot car and you just went to the grocery store without leaving the house.
If we don’t, remember me knocks it out of the park once again.
Just look at that shot. The clouds starting to fly past, Ripley’s expression, the sneaker propped up on the console, the blink. Alien had a look that perfectly captured a sense of place. Everything in that movie feels solid, used, real.
Compare that to Avatar or the Star Wars prequels where it feels like nobody is really holding anything. We see the characters in a world that they aren’t attached to.
“Micro-changes in air density, my ass.”