Give it a second

"It's going to space! Give it a second!" exclaimed comedian Louis C.K. in observing that we are completely spoiled by modern technology, when something ridiculously awesome shows the slightest hiccup or slowdown.

I'm the spoiledest of the spoiled, but I've tried to take Louie's advice and not let my blood pressure rise when my iPhone is a little sluggish or Safari 4 damn near crashes when trying to deal with Facebook throwing zillions of people's personality quiz results in my face. It's left me feeling a little more like grateful that I can connect into the hive mind while I'm out and about. And in theory, that lets me be out and about more, instead of connected to the computer, to do more interesting things and make further contributions to that hive mind. In practice, however, my mobile contributions are pretty slim. "I'm playing Peggle while waiting for my car to get fixed!" and a mildly funny, dimly-lit picture from a bar mark my mobile content sharing for the month of July.

At the very least, new techie things will help me be smarter on campus come next month. By the end of my college career, I was plum retarded. I forgot stuff that was written in my paper planner twice and on my hand at the same time. I accidentally stood up friends, forgot homework assignments and generally tested the patience of everyone who surrounded me.

Thankfully, I discovered an amazing toy and set it up to go through the interwebs to keep me on my game this time around.

It's called ReQall. Basically, it's a "getting things done" tool - a to-do list with some organizational flair - but this one's awesome because it plays nicely with anything you can imagine: email, texting, Google Chat, iCal, Google Calendar, smartphones, and so on. Oh, and your own voice. That one's covered too.

So, let me give you a few examples of things I've said into ReQall and had it take care of perfectly:

"Pack and ship electronics on July 14th." It made a to-do item, due on the 14th, which I'll check off when I'm done.
"Dentist appointment Tuesday at 2." It made an event item, due on this coming Tuesday (the 14th) at 2:00, and it will either email me or text me with a reminder one hour before.

It's hit-and-miss with proper names. So far it's got about 50% accuracy: it nailed friends named Netta and Red, but misspelled Professor Bohn as "Professor Bone" and got "U-Verse" right one out of two times, the other mistaking it for "users." All in all, an extremely impressive act.

Here's some more examples of cool things it can do:
“Remind Roger to buy bread after work today.” If Roger is listed as a contact inside your ReQall account, it will email or text Roger telling him to buy bread after work today. If he's your friend on ReQall, it will add "bread" to Roger's "shopping list" section and send him the email or text.
"Call Roger at home." You use GPS to tell it where "home" is, and once you're there, it will send you a reminder to call Roger.

For me, all this stuff is already amazing and revolutionary. But here's the kicker: it will push to your phone.

ReQall will automatically push your stuff to Google Calendar. It's incredibly easy to turn on, one click really. From there, Google Sync will take your calendar and push that to your phone.

So, long story short, I just say the words "Meet with Professor Joe at 2PM next Friday," and come next Friday at 1 my phone gets a text with the reminder that I'm meeting Professor Joe. And anywhere in between, I can see it on the iPhone calendar, because it got pushed to the phone.

I'm willing to have patience with technology that will do that. After all, I'm asking technology to have a lot of patience with my forgetful self.

@Twitter:

You're so overrated.

Let me list your legit uses:

1. Keeping track of people during large events (like SxSW)
2. Keeping track of people during catastrophic emergencies (like natural disasters)
3. Promoting your cause if you're an activist (like Al Gore) or a performer (like your buddy who's a musician or DJ).

Now let me list the really lame reasons people actually use you:

1. To have actual conversations with friends (What?! We have phones and texting, people, how are @replies any better?)
2. As a source of news for CNN (Impending apocalypse and collapse of the American empire? Heeeeeeeeeeere's yer sign.)
3. To shill new blog entries (If your blog's that interesting, I read it.)
4. To try (and fail) to be witty using 140 characters. (The extremely witty John Mayer is exempt from this complaint.)
5. To announce one's drunkenness between 1:00 and 3:00AM. (We know.)

And to top it off, you've got a whole stack of problems:

1. My shrink dad had suicidal patients that were more stable.
2. When you're actually online, you've still got bugs like phantom follower requests.
3. I get worthless follower requests from organizations and anonymous individuals in which I have no interest whatsoever. Shouldn't this legally constitute spam?

So, with all of the above points in mind, I'm abandoning you. I'll leave my account active, and I'll probably confirm follower requests, but I'm stopping the updates, removing the iPhone app, and removing it from my favorites.

We're done, and I hope the world eventually realizes that the Twitter plague is infinitely more dangerous to society than #swine_flu.

Touch-screen DJing!

I want to do this so bad. Peep the write-up at Engadget, but long story short the latest gimmick-cool use of Microsoft Surface is to do basic DJ work.

By dragging loop icons into a central circle, that starts them playing and they'll go until you drag the icon back out. Other icons, once inside the circle, can be tapped for a one-off sound.

I've always been too lazy to learn proper DJing, and too frugal to go pick up the newfangled CDJ systems that electronically simulate turntables, but a user-friendly approach like this would be a hell of a lot of fun to play with. You could even sell more sounds in a digital market, kinda like Rock Band does.

C'mon Microsoft, do it!

Stuff I love and do not love

Stuff I love:

My Mac. Sorry, it's a snooty Apple User thing to say, but I started window shopping for a new machine earlier today and realized I just plain didn't need one. Back when I was a hyper gamer, everything in my machine would've been painfully old after a year and a half. Yet I've had my little Mac for well over a year and a half and I haven't had to reformat the thing once. I used to do that at least once every 6 months in my previous life. I might be lucky enough to go computer shopping once I head back to school, but honestly, I think I just need a big monitor more than I do new hardware.

Stuff I don't love:

LittleBigPlanet. Yeah, the first level is outrageously charming, but now that I'm 4 worlds in, it's just another platformer. Thanks to my newfound hatred for The Internet, I'm also not interested in user-created levels, either. Imagine my surprise when every comment left on every level is "Play my 6 new Super Mario levelz!!!" Nor do I have the desire, or the time, to make my own platformer levels.

It doesn't matter how many palettes or options or tools they give you, it would never be enough to satisfy a truly creative desire, no matter how many raving reviews come in saying that it's a "create your own.. thing" tool instead of a "create your own platformer level" tool. The reason editors for games like Warcraft III are so good is that they're built on top of phenomenally deep games - something LBP isn't. Warcraft III managed to spawn levels and modifications so good that they became their own genres, "games" like Tower Defense (now its own genre of game within iPhone games) and DOTA (whose developers are moving into full-blown game making).

LittleBigPlanet, however, is at heart a platformer, and the bulk of its creations are Super Mario Bros. homage levels as a result. I don't doubt the possibility of a few gems coming out of its online level-sharing system, but there's doubtlessly going to be too much nonsense to sift through.

This is why we pay people called game designers money in order to use research, intellect, and talent to make games that are objectively good. LittleBigPlanet is objectively good, but at this rate I may not even bother to finish the game that's actually on the disc. There's nothing to look forward to at the end of the road.

Another thing I totally called

Apple is going to tank in the next 5 years.

The great thing Apple had going 2 years ago with the Mac is on its way out. Even as I bought my very own Mac, I had the sensation that Apple's newfound awesomeness wouldn't last long. The famously rock-solid OSX is now buggy and unstable, the hardware is cheap Chinese-made garbage, and that's just the computers.

iPods are now harder to use and the software crashes. The AppleTV just isn't good enough when compared to what you can do with an Xbox 360, and the iPhone - while awesome on paper - is open to tons of problems outside Apple's control, such as AT&T's poor network management and billing headaches.

Apple's plan for world domination isn't working out like they hoped. The soon-to-be-famous MobileMe fiasco shows that they can't quite enter the 'service' market like they hoped.

Sorry, kiddos, but I can no longer recommend you Apple stuff like I've been apt to do for the last couple years.