Crunk Energy Drink

Posted on 2009.02.28 by joshkim

If I wanted to come off a bit more extreme, I would have properly titled this post:

CRUNK!!! ENERGY DRINK REVIEW!!11!

Hey look, there’s a Benq 24″ LCD in the background.

Although, I used the larger version of the image just to be obnoxious. But seriously, naming an energy drink as Crunk?

Few comments, really. I need some more posts in the Caffeine category anyway.

I like the Can Design. It definitely stands out from the other brands. Monster is largely black while Red Bull is blue and “clear” (the bare aluminum). We need more yellow.
In the list of ingredients: Horny Goat Weed. Interesting.
Nose: Slightly medicinal and citric. There’s not much to it at all.

Taste: Lightly carbonated, and tasted very sour with no sweetness at all.
Finish: Clean, but with that annoying HFCS aftertaste. Slight bitterness.
Effectiveness: Meh. I think this was around the time I was drugged up on caffeine, so that might be why I didn’t feel any of the effects, though.

3/5. Not the best thing that I’ve tasted. Won’t be buying it again.

CHANGELOG: The Ads

Posted on 2009.02.28 by joshkim

The Moneys

Ads are back. This can only mean a good thing, because that means I’m making a conscientious effort to actually write something that’s of value.

I’m currently messing with three different sources for making a bit of money on the side with the blog:

Google Adsense: One ad per single.php, for more focused targetting
Amazon Affiliates: Omakase, for now. I may want to make the JKStore a big more accessible soon.
Text-Link-Ads: Not sure how this works just yet.

Online Identity

Finally added more interaction with Twitter. Not sure if people were really wanting it, but I kinda wanted to do this for a long while.

I ended up just putting up links to Flickr and Twitter under /etc/ for now. I would like to lifestream like I did before, but I don’t know if that’ll actually be useful… or maybe a project I’m working on will obviate that anyway. And plus, I suck at this server admin stuff: I tried for a few minutes the lifestream wordpress plugin (which seems amazing), and I almost had a heart attack that the server was going to go down again.

Posting Schedule

I have this general feeling that I’m going to do more personal posts during the weekends, and more interesting and relevant posts during the weekday. I kinda want to make sure that I post something really beefy on Sunday night, kind of as a weekly deadline for something in-depth.

Don’t hold me to any of this. This is just me thinking out loud like I normally do. (And, as some will notice, I won’t be linking this on a tweet.)

Look/Feel

Back to the redness. Oh, how I’ve missed you.

Started adding new tabs to the navigation. Not sure exactly what’ll end up here.

Blah blah blah

I’m hungry. Working on the blog for 4 hours straight is pretty fun, but very draining.

Kindle 2 Official Leather Cover Review

Posted on 2009.02.27 by joshkim

Being the first adopter of anything, in this case, a physical product, you run the risk of not only having to deal with the gadget itself, but with any other issues that related accessories might bring.

I can think of numerous examples of this. I remember when I got the 1st generation iPod nano, and I dropped it not one day from when I opened the packaging. There was no cover/case at the time, and so I used the plastic packaging that came with it.

More recently, just before the Kindle, it was the MacBook Pro. I had a Brenthaven Metro bag (which, to this day, I love and cherish… the sucker is built like a womb for the earlier MacBook Pros), and when I switched up to the late 2008 unibody one, it wouldn’t fit. Actually, nothing would fit it snugly at the Apple Store, except for the not-so pretty 15″ Incase sleeve/bag.

Now, with the first Kindle, I hear there was a cover included, which sucked: the Kindle would fall out of the cover constantly (and I bet the fact that you couldn’t pick up the Kindle without turning the page didn’t help with it either). Here, it’s an additional $29.99. Is it worth it?

In a Nutshell

Yeah, It’s absolutely essential. That screen has absolutely no protection whatsoever. With the iPhone, you have whatever magical substance between the LCD and the world around it (which is why I was okay with not having a case for it… until I dropped it, but there’s a story there… moving on). With this cover, I feel much secure in knowing that the top and bottom of the Kindle is safe and sound.

So here comes the pics. In the same way as the Kindle was packaged, you have to tear open the box using the neat tab marked “Once upon a time…”

For the Kindle 2 redesign, they made sure to incorporate notches to the unit itself, so that it would work perfectly with the cover.

I loved the instruction insert. Very clear. You first insert the Kindle into the lower curved hook, rotate it to be parallel to the cover, then use the top latch (which retracts to its original position) locks the Kindle in place.

The trouble I had was with the lack of any attachment on the right side of the Kindle. The hooks in the binding of the cover are strong, but fairly thin. This picture above shows how far the back cover will open up, if left hanging. I fear for the notches on the Kindle 2 might get ruined if held like this for a while. Of course, this hopefully never happens, as you will always be holding the whole case firmly… but it’s not a big deal.

Minus this single downside, everything else is amazing. The leather cover and the soft inside feels wonderful. The fact that the front cover can be folded behind the back cover like a magazine is great. The added thickness and traction actually makes the whole Kindle reading experience a bit better (although, I do like to take it out of the cover now and then, and feel how amazingly light it actually is). The cover also makes it very easy to just close up the “book” and go.

If I’ve somehow convinced you to buy the cover, here’s the link: Amazon Kindle 2 Leather Cover

I still have a couple more Kindle reviews left in me: one general one about the Kindle itself, and at least another about how Kindle is going to change my reading habits. Stay tuned for those.

Kindle 2 Review: The Unboxing

Posted on 2009.02.24 by joshkim

I was delightfully surprised by the unboxing process. I definitely felt like it added to the whole experience.

I have lots of pics from my awesome iPhone camera (sorry, I don’t own any others… photogs, please don’t hurt me). Thanks to Flickr for footing the bandwidth.

Just as I gave on UPS delivering this thing on time before the end of my lunch break (I kid you not, I was reaching for the doorknob as I was leaving my apartment), I heard the knock on my door.

A few unboxing pictures had made it earlier today, however, I didn’t see any pictures peeling open the box, so I was excited to tear it open.

Inside were two more boxes, one for the Kindle and the first party case I bought.

In my hurry to open the box, I was annoyed at how difficult it would be to open the box. The flaps were glued shut. Then I took a deep breath, calmed myself down a bit, and looked for another way in. Then, I realized that there was a nice tab opening on the side, with the words “Once upon a time…” written on it. Definitely a nice touch.

Inside, I saw a lovely black embossing of letters feeing into the plastic compartment that held the Kindle.

Again, with the same tab action. After that, you see the innards. Basically, it comes with the Kindle itself, a quick start guide and a USB cable with an adaptor.

That’s the shot of the stuff behind the Kindle.

But wait, here’s the moment where I was in awe of the whole unboxing experience.

It looks like it’s a protective plastic sticker with an even quicker start guide printed on it. I removed the sticker… and the guide was still there! Oh, you lovely e-ink! Even as I use it right now, I can’t believe I’m not using a lot of (if not, at all) power to have the characters stay on screen (minus the wireless, of course).

Happy little loading screen later, I’m in business.

More on this, as I find time to blog. And here’s an affiliate link, just in case I’ve somehow made you buy the thing. Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

More to come, with time and use.

Kindle 2: Initial Impressions

Posted on 2009.02.24 by joshkim

I don’t have pics. I’ll post them up later tonight.

Packaging is great. I like the whole “Once Upon A Time…” opening strips on both the Kindle and the cover accessory. The rest of the packaging has a nice mixture of cool and environmentally-friendly.

Mind explosion #1: I open the Kindle, and I see a nice diagram about what I should do first on the sticker covering the face of the Kindle. Of course, I remove this sticker after I plug it into the wall, and those same directions are there. I did a double take. Ah ha, I figured out. It’s this awesome e-ink business. Oh, you trixy Kindle.

Another cool thing is that whenever you turn off the Kindle, it defaults to a portrait of the writer. Last time it was Poe. This time, it was Twain. I wonder how many of these portraits exist.

The new cover design. I hear the first gen Kindle’s kept falling out of their covers (which was included back then… not so anymore. These revisions are a bit better, although it seems like one more latch of the right side of the Kindle would have been nice. The Kindle is only attached at the binding, which might cause the two tiny little slits on the Kindle to break if opened improperly. You’ll see what I mean when I post some pics.

The size. Much smaller than I thought… then again, I’ve never seen these in real life. Not a good or a bad thing, just a thing

One HUGE disappointment: responsiveness of the UI. The page turning is fine. It’s a tiny tiny bit slower than what I’m used to, going from page to page on a normal book… but when you start messing with that 5-way button, the lag is ridiculous. I feel like this is a firmware issue, and not a limitation of the device… but it does bother me a little bit. However, it’s not missing my clicks, so I can just hit it 5 separate times to have the cursor go down 5 lines… it just takes a little bit of time for the Kindle to catch up.

Yeah, I know. No pics, or it didn’t happen. Blah.

Beyond Good And Evil: Yet Another Terrific Game I Didn't Know About

Posted on 2009.02.23 by joshkim

I can’t really pinpoint when or where I heard of this game. I remember a game magazine had a feature of it, and I remember seeing the green lipped heroine, Jade, as well as the pig sidekick, Pey’J. It was probably during high school. I also remember seeing something about this game on an episode of X-Play. (yes, I still like this show… Sessler is the man.)

Recently, it was the game of the month by the people at the Vintage Game Club. It was also $9.99 on Steam. This was also around the time I was thinking more and more about PC gaming again, and so it all fit fairly perfectly.

I finished it yesterday night, with a crash just before the credits (which I saw on YouTube: link for those that have the same problem).

So without reading the other reviews of those at Vintage Game Club, here goes. (Which reminds me, I need to go read some of them.)

Quick Review

If I still had my tablet, I would draw a graph of awesomeness as a function of time. But since I don’t, I’ll try to use words instead. Basically, it’s an upward curve, with a few valleys along the way, ending with a plateau.

Aside from the frustrating time I had trying to get the game to run properly (read Technical Issues), I remember just gobbling up the experience left and right at the beginning of the game. From the uses of the camera to the inventory system, all felt like a slight play on previous games I’ve played, and at the same time, completely refreshing.

With the camera, I kept thinking of Pokemon Snap, a rails-”shooter” where you take pictures of Pokemon. But this wasn’t just about taking pictures of animals. Without giving much more about the game, just know that it had more uses than just taking pictures of animals.

The vehicles were great, although I blame the lack of a controller to my slight annoyances that occurred at certain points of the game. The combat was simple, but as in the good kind of simple. I actually didn’t understand how simple it was until I had to look it up: Really, it’s just swing, swing towards a certain direction, or dodge. There are some neat things you have to do with your partner in certain parts of the game that add to the flavor of the combat.

This is where my first big valley of vexation comes into play: there’s a part around the mid-game where it might get a bit tedious. You really have just one type of enemy you have to fight, and they’re disarmed in the same fashion. Over and over and over again. Some might find this tedium faster than me, but luckily, it turns out that as soon as I felt the boring set in, it became all awesome again.

Oh, and how can I forget; the story and the characters. I’m not going to say anything more than that I felt really connected with the characters. Very wonderfully voice-acted with a beautiful soundtrack. Everything is amazing in this department, except… I read somewhere that this was supposed to be the first part in a trilogy. The ending really didn’t tie up the loose ends, but opened it up to another game that would follow (which, thankfully, seems like it’s coming for this generation of consoles). I was left with wanting a lot more, not only in the gameplay hours, but with the story.

Since I’m a UI nerd, I have a comment on some of the interfaces Jade would have to interact with. I guess this really isn’t a spoiler, but the “gears” switches that were used a couple times in the beginning of the game and once nearer to the end just seemed really out of place. I don’t know how else I would have implemented it, but it just didn’t mesh with the rest of the world. There are a couple more of these one-offs that I found to be just a tiny bit out of the blue, most of them were brilliantly done. (I remember this one part where I had to take a picture of something, and I was so amazed, I sat there for a couple seconds wondering what had just happened.)

The inventory and the password system both rely on the mouse (but it definitely seems like it was created for an analog stick). It just felt so right using it with my trackball (yes, I’m weird… or am I just that awesome?). More games need to be designed for the trackball… (this is an idea of mine… did someone say Super Monkey Ball with an actual ball interface?)

Technical Issues

If you’re rocking the unibody MacBook Pros (late 2008), you might run into issues running this game. Make sure to set the Affinity of the BGE.exe process to just one of the cores. If you don’t do this, you will have issues with the game running much faster than normal. (Actually, I use this to get through the beginning credits faster.) Just ctrl+alt+delete your way out of the game, right click on the process, and set the affinity to either CPU 0 or CPU 1.

Also, make sure not to pump out all the graphics. This causes some hilarious glitches with Jade missing her torso. I was playing it at everything max, except for anti-aliasing set to mid (I think you could set it higher, but this worked for me).

I had a minor problem with some of the later cutscenes having the audio be a little bit faster than what was happening on the screen. It wasn’t a huge deal, and at that point, I was so engrossed in the game, I didn’t want to restart it.

Conclusion

I can’t believe I waited this long to play this game. Heck, it was on the GameCube, even, and I had that console for a while. I genuinely feel like I missed something as a gamer before playing this game. It was the same kind of feeling I got when I played Braid for the first and second and maybe the third time.

At face value, it just seems like another action-adventure. But it’s much more: In comparison to Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, BGE stands fairly close, but doesn’t match at all to the length of Zelda. (I think is more or less a statement of my weariness of the series than anything else… don’t trust me on this sentence). My goodness this game is short. Less than 10 hours, easy, and I was fairly anal about the whole thing, taking pictures of almost all animals (I believe I’m missing two) and collecting almost all the pearls (except for the Looter’s Cavern 3 and 4 and some random pearls).

But even taking into account the length, some minor annoyances, and a less-than satisfying ending, this game is well worth the time and money. Highly recommended from me.

Sidenote: I keep saying “animals”, but I think it’s generally most living things. I don’t know the specific wording used in the game, but this was faster to type.

Why I Have Started To Like Comcast

Posted on 2009.02.17 by joshkim

It feels a little weird, slightly liking the enemy of many of my peers. But the way that this issue was handled was surprisingly amazing.

Waking Up This Morning

I woke up, and from a suggestion by @ATLChris from Twitter, I decided to go through with threatening cancellation to bring down my price. Not sure how much I can get it to drop, I decided to give them a ring.

On the other end of the line was one of the nicest customer representatives I’ve talked to. If I really was calling to cancel, she would have had my order done without any hassle. Which worried me, because I was waiting for a phrase along the lines of, “Is there anything I can do to make you stay?”

Then, the moment hit. So I explained the story that I’ve written very quickly. She offered yet another introductory rate of $39.95 for six months. In six months, I would be canceling, so I agreed.

And then it got even more interesting.

Two Phone Calls

I don’t normally get phone calls during work hours, but I got one. The number showed up on my caller ID; it wasn’t blocked.

Turns out it that the call was in response to a tweet I made. I @’d @ComcastCares with the link to the blog post, in an effort to see if they could help. At that moment, I had a very weird feeling, wondering how the heck this person got a hold of my number… (I still don’t know how, because my legal name is different and I didn’t actually direct message back my phone number…) but at the same time, I felt like I was getting quite the treatment. (In the end, it turns out it wasn’t the same person who’s in charge of the @ComcastCares account.)

He called to see if he could rectify the situation. Of course, I could have pushed for an even cheaper offer, but at this point, I was okay with the $40 I would be paying. He made sure that everything was resolved okay.

At this point, I felt fairly happy with Comcast. I started to forget the customer service experience from yesterday.

Later in the day, I get another one. Yet another unblocked number. This time, it was someone that seemed from somewhere higher up in the complaint ladder. She made sure everything was taken care of, blah blah blah.

In retrospect, I should have been a little angry that this last phone call happened. After all, are they going to keep calling me at work to make sure everything was okay? Another phone call would have done it.

Maybe It’s Just For The Tweeple?

If you’ve read the most recent issue of Wired (or this article), you’ll get a slightly positive view of Comcast. I didn’t agree with this at all when I read it. But now, after this experience, my view on the company changed a bit.

This is a genius move on Comcast’s part. Appease the techies, and let them do the word-of-mouth advertising on their own. “Comcast isn’t evil.” “They’re so quick to respond… on Twitter.”

I can now start talking about Twitter’s effect on customer relationship management software. I can also talk about how viable Twitter’s business model might be if they start charging businesses.

But that’d be detracting from the point of the post. Back on Comcast.

It’s not just because I got a pretty good price on my Internet service; it’s because of the fact that Comcast seems to be changing… at least the Twitter facing portion. All those horror stories about ridiculous customer “support”… Here’s to hoping that those days are far behind Comcast.

I have to thank @ComcastCares and @ComcastBill for everything. And the people who called me that I can’t really @.

I can’t believe I’ve started to use @ as a verb. I should totally start using more symbols.

Why I Continue To Not Like Comcast

Posted on 2009.02.17 by joshkim

This story has very little do with their actual Internet service (which is not very good to begin with: huge huge latency and bandwidth issues at certain points in the day), but instead their customer service.

I noticed a recent hike in my monthly Internet bill. I knew that my introductory pricing plan was up, and I knew that I would be paying the full price. I called in and found out that since Insight, my old Internet provider, was bought out by Comcast, that their old monthly prices were null and void. Now I had to pay the new Comcast rate of $60.

So the customer service rep comes up with a great idea: Why not add basic cable for $10 and reduce the Internet bill to $43? This came to me as a surprise, and made me ask her why would anyone go for the now full price of $60 for users of only the Internet service? She mumbled some reason about some people wanting to have different cable service, but that still didn’t make any sense. I decided to not push any further.

So I said, fine. I’ll pay the $53 (~$55 including tax, hooray for $5 of savings). I then asked if there was there any way to reduce this month’s bill to the previous rate, seeing how I was not notified of this change in rate from Insight’s normal rate to Comcast’s. So she graciously waives the $44 installation fee. Wait, what? You were going to charge me an installation fee? For what?

All you have to do on your end is change the numbers on my billing statement. I guess not, because it gets even better.

She then asks me for an appointment time to come and install the cable. I tell her, no one watches TV here. In fact, there is no TV in the apartment. We go back and forth a couple times, me telling her that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to come out because nothing is going to change physically in the apartment on our end. Then she puts me on hold to go and figure this out.

She comes back, saying that I would have to pay the full $60 if I didn’t have a TV.

blink blink. What?

So I said screw it, and made an appointment to install tomorrow. Without having a TV. I’m probably going to have to find a TV if the technician is really picky, but instead, I’m hoping to sweet talk him into not doing jack squat to the apartment. There goes 2 hours of my life waiting for a service that I don’t need or want, which is paid for by the company providing the service. Yippee.

This entire situation is just so mind-bogglingly retarded, I had to put it to blog form and share it. Maybe I can tweet it @ComcastCares and see if they really care.

PostgreSQL, Ruby, and Rails: WIN

Posted on 2009.02.15 by joshkim

This is a follow-up to my post: PostgreSQL, Ruby, and Rails: I Quit.

So I finally have a working machine with the following installed and ready to rock:

Ruby and Rails: From MacPorts
- Tip: Don’t forget: “source ~/.profile”
- Do not touch /etc/profile, even though Robby said so. (Although, I’d like to ask why he said to modify /etc/profile…) Everything else in that walkthrough is awesome.
  - /etc/profile is read-only. I really didn’t want to change this, and I even went and looked into /etc/paths.d. Don’t. You don’t need to.
- Why not use the native Ruby that was shipped with Apple? That’s for another time.
Passenger(mod_rails) and PassengerPanes
- My problem was after installing Ruby and Rubygems through MacPorts, I didn’t update the $PATH.
  - You do not need to create symbolic links (“ln”) at all. Just make sure to “source ~/.profile” after you’re done messing with the PATH variable in it.
- PassengerPanes is amazing. Use it, and love it if you’re doing any testing on your mac before capistrano’ing the whole thing on a test server.
Git
- Simple installation as “git-core” on MacPorts. I didn’t have any problems with this one.
PostgreSQL
- MacPorts again. Makes sure to also install pgAdmin3, a nice GUI for PostgreSQL.

Which Gem? How To Install It?

If you go to the RubyForge page, you’ll see two gems. I still don’t understand why the releases were named with the “rb-” prefix (maybe to distinguish that it’s a ruby gem). Regardless, there are two gems listed “pg” and “postgres”.

Although “postgres” seems to be more out of date, this is the one that you’re going to want for the near future. Eventually, you’ll be wanting the “pg” gem. If you read some of the news, you’ll see that they’re also working on making sure that it works with Ruby 1.9.

Following yet another great walkthrough, you’re going to want to install it in this manner on an Intel Mac (if you installed PostgreSQL through MacPorts).

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" \
  gem install postgres -- \
  --with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql83 \
  --with-pgsql-include=/opt/local/include/postgresql83

PostgreSQL with Rails

Now that PostgreSQL is talking with Ruby, now let’s make Rails talk with it.

In config/database.yml, make sure the adaptor is set to “postgresql”, like so.

development:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: projectname_development
pool: 5
username: username
password: password

That was taken from the generated database.yml, which is done this way when you start your rails project.

rails projectname -d postgresql

My Thanks and Apologies

Thank you to all the blogs I’ve visited over and over again through Google queries. Some information was outdated (and at one point, this will also be outdated), but that’s how it is with anything web development, especially anything to do with Rails it seems. The speed at which this community keeps innovating continues to surprise me, and makes me happy that I made that choice to go with Rails (even though I struggled through it from time to time).

This doesn’t mean I’m done. Oh no, now I have to actually design, test, and develop on the stack I’ve created. I’m sure I’ll be sitting in on the Rails IRC room a couple times.

My apologies for not having a more complete walkthrough, although, I hope the links I’ve included will help out more. If you have any questions, just leave a comment, and I’ll try to help.

Now to keep on hackin’.

Breadth And Depth

Posted on 2009.02.12 by joshkim

Here’s a list of things I’m learning concurrently, which only includes in the world of “Web Development”. Just skim it, it’s more or less for Future Josh to come back and laugh at.

Linux: Ubuntu and all the joys of it (Oh, linux distros, and the tiny little inconsistencies, like where config files are and how the directories are structured)
- Apache: Lots and lots of settings, I don’t think I’ve even scraped the tip of the iceberg here
- Passenger: Simple, you’d think, but I have a very weird error with…
- Redmine: Issue tracking, also learning how to deploy a Rails app
- Git: Server-side
- MySQL Administration
Mac OS X
- Internal File System Structure: Removing Ruby completely screwed up some stuff (Like MacVim, but totally fixed that, weird .dylib issue)
- MacPorts, which was used to reinstall ruby/rails because of a weird rubygems error
- Git: Client-side
- Unfuddle: Git push isn’t working, going to have to fix it.
- PostgreSQL Administration
Ruby/Rails
- Gems, oh sweet lord, gems. WORK (testing out a couple rss-related gems)
Objective-C
- XCode/IB: Just learning the tools
- Cocoa: The []‘s are making sense! Wee!
RegEx: For a very quick side project requiring URL parsing

The Past: Breadth

Since I never actually followed through with any of my projects, the only real outcome of the past two years. I know so many facts, methods, processes, applications… but knowledge by itself just seems a little useless.

I’ve already made the decisions with the information I’ve gathered over the past two years. Only now am I really following through with them.

The Present: Depth

Now that reality has set in, and I’m really really (and wait for the time when I’m really really really) starting some projects, I’m diving further and further into these past topics. It’s very frustration while interesting to find out more and more about the entire stack that is web development.

If you follow me on Twitter, I’m sure you’ll see me rant and complain about this and that… but at the end of the day (or… the early morning) I always come back to loving this stuff. I must be sadistic or something.

Sidenote: I’m probably going to be trying to do something for a long while, and I personally need to be okay with this. It’s going to take a long time to create something awesome, and that should be fine. Oh, the high standards I set for myself, only to be met with huge failures…

The Future: The Mix

So much left to learn and to experience… it’s going to be tough, but I just need to put in the time. I keep forgetting how many hours, days, months it’s going to take to get something great out. I keep wanting to sprint as hard as I can, but I keep forgetting that this is a marathon.

joshkim.org

Be Awesome Instead // Essays by Josh Kim

Monthly Archives: February 2009