Jaiku is still the best Lifestream app

I wrote back in September that Jaiku was the ultimate microblogging platform. In the 4 months since then, it’s gone from Microblogging to Lifestreaming, but it’s still the same thing. SocialStream didn’t come about as anticipated, but I’ve tried a bunch of different Lifestreaming/Microblogging web apps since then. Tumblr keeps being brought up as one of the top lifestreaming apps, but the advantage of easily mapping your tumblelog (sp?) to your own domain is immediately counteracted by the fact that you can only import 5 feeds. That’s probably enough for most people, but for those of us like me (how many of us are there anyway?) who have Twitter, Flickr, blog (you’re reading it), Yelp reviews, del.icio.us bookmarks, recent Diggs (or other social news site votes), and recent Halo 3 games, you can’t fit them all. (I could add my Netflix At Home or Queue feed in there, but I haven’t really decided which of those Netflix feeds I want to expose to the public) Anyway, as you can see, there are too many feeds to put into a Tumblr lifestream.

Soup.io lets you add as many feeds as you want, and they make it pretty easy to map your own domain. Buuuuuuuut, neither Soup nor Tumblr let you leave comments on someone else’s Lifestream/Tumblelog/Microblog. Jaiku does. And Jaiku still lets you unsubscribe from friends’ individual feeds. So, if you don’t care when I play Halo 3, or what I digg (not that it happens that often anyway), then you can (still) unsubscribe from those aspects of my Jaiku-ing. And now that Google has purchased Jaiku, you can rest assured that the service will continue (even if no further development is done on it) for what will probably be a long time (in web-relative time).

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the Jaiku feature set integrated into the social activity streams that Google is slowly adding to their suite of applications. At first I thought that the mobile app Jaiku built was the reason Google made the acquisition (and I still think that’s probably part of it, since Google is now launching their own mobile OS), but I can now see that the - shall we say - more advanced lifestreaming features were also an important part of the deal; the ability to unsubscribe from individual feeds probably being at the top of the list there.

While I’m on the subject and rambling away, I think Google/Jaiku made a serious error in shutting down the open sign up process when the purchase was made. I’m sure that day was the most traffic Jaiku had ever seen, and I know that both Twitter and Jaiku were set ablaze with comments on which one people should be using. Google should have capitalized on the momentum to get as many new Jaiku users as possible, and given them the opportunity to see why Jaiku is still the best Lifestreaming platform as well as a great microblogging platform.

Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3 Tour - Chicago

On a metaphysical level it was nice to have another day off from work. On a realphysical level, it was nice to get back into the routine. And not having to walk all the way from the entrace of Navy Pier to the back. It was a 10 minute walk and I was trucking it.

I took a picture of Colin with my cameraphone, and I was all excited cause I found out the USB cord for my real camera connects to my phone, too. But when I connected it, Windows couldn’t find the software, and so, no picture.

Anyway…

Colin was a great presenter, and I applaud him for presenting for essentially 8 hours (he kept saying 9, but that included the lunch break). I guess when the name is “ActionScript from the Ground Up” I shouldn’t have been expecting any real advanced coverage of the topic. I got a great review of OOP, though, and I’m sure for all the Flash “design” type people there, it was way too fast. It was essentially a 9 week course crammed into 9 hours with no time for homework. So, yeah, I’m sure there were some minds blown. But I also am sure there were people who were bored out of their minds. I was close, but I hung on and managed to pick up things here and there even in the OOP stuff. That said, I’m pretty sure I can skip his book (sorry Colin!) since the reviews on Amazon say that it goes a lot into the OOP stuff. But that frees up some cash, so I can get the RIAs with Flex and Java book I’ve been wanting forever, or else Adobe’s Flex 3 training book. And for Adobe, I think that was the point anyway; just to get people more exposure to ActionScript and make them more interested in using it; so they can stay on top of Silverlight.

I am also glad I got to see how similar ActionScript is to Java. I’d say that AS is probably more like Java than JavaScript. Of course, names for languages really don’t tell you anything about them.

I overloaded myself with the Flex/ActionScript by reading my Flex 2 with ActionScript 3 book on the train and bus to the event. Now, I will try to busy myself with a game I’d like to develop using Flex/ActionScript, and try to also fit in an extra credit project at work using Ruby on Rails. My FA side project will be a good one since I can probably move quickly to advanced Flex/ActionScript concepts since the languages are so similar to what I already know. The RoR project will have a bit more of a learning curve since I’m still getting to know Ruby.

Just an FYI (while I was finding the picture below), I came across this TIOBE software site that ranks programming languages. As of Dec 2007, Ruby is at #9 while ActionScript is #25 (glad to see it’s at least that high; MXML doesn’t count as a programming language). Java is #1 with a 20% share, so I guess it’s good that I’ve got that one down pretty well.

Imitation… blah blah … flattery …

Shortform: Bionic Woman = Alias + bionic parts + little sister - 1st/2nd season “friends” - (prophecy + familial turmoil)

There are seriously some times when Michelle Ryan (aka Jamie Sommers) looks exactly like Jennifer Garner (aka Sidney Bristow). And I’m pretty sure I like it (it being Bionic Woman - not Michelle Ryan looking like Jennifer Garner) because they’re pretty much copying the Alias formula for all it’s worth, and actually getting it right. Could use a little more Sarah McLachlan, though. Nothing says “Heroine Emotion” like Sarah McLachlan.

I also like it because the parts that are different from Alias are well done. Sometimes so well done that I wonder if Bionic Woman might not turn out to be a better show than Alias. Scary, I know. But the little sister part is well done and takes up just the right amount of time to be a good diversion from the rest of the show (except for the part where Jonas drives her home from the police station and then appears in Paris the same night to talk to Jamie; though, I’m sure the Berkut group has a private airport, and maybe they have a plane like the Concorde).

The flirting went a little overboard in the most recent episode (The List), but I liked it at least as much - if not more - than the brooding, deep stuff that went on with Sidney and Vaughn. I’m sure it’s hard to write it so that the humor works while still keeping the show fairly dark and not going off into Chuck territory.

I was going to make a list of things that look like:

Marshall = Nathan

Sloane = Jonas

Fiance killed in 1st episode = Fiance killed in 1st episode

but I’m sure that’s already been done on about a dozen other blogs. So, let me end with this:

Dear NBC,

Can you please switch Bionic Woman with Journeyman (or just go ahead and cancel Journeyman; it’s too much like Day Break and nobody watched that dumb show). Journeyman seems like a much better fit with Life (both single white men trying to solve mysteries about their lives), and Bionic Woman seems like a much better fit with Chuck and Heroes (that doesn’t even need a parenthetical - it’s practically like Chuck and Heroes had a baby who was Bionic Woman).

Also, this would allow me to watch Bionic Woman when it’s broadcast, forcing me to view the commercials that appear on my TV screen, as opposed to watching it online where I can just click over to my email or Bloglines for 30 seconds while Toyota plays a nice little song for me.

Thanks for helping me out,

Nels

Birthday 2.0

This is what my inbox looked like on the recent anniversary of my birth:

(You can click it to see the whole thing)

Related only by the fact that it’s Gmail… I found this to be an interesting advertisement:

So you conspiracy nuts who think that Google is reading all your mail… um, yeah. See Thru Bikinis.

I am a typical Amazon customer

This was on my Amazon home page today:

This has been the top of my Music Wishlist for close to a month now (you’d know that as well as I if the WordPress template didn’t cut off the “added” dates):

So (without a lot of statistical analysis), I am an 88% typical Amazon customer. Or maybe, I’m in the 88th Percentile of typical Amazon customers. Or maybe, I fit Amazon’s data model to 88% accuracy.

Reading Between the Battle Lines

Acquired via BookMooch: a trio of books about Halo including The Fall of Reach, The Flood, and First Strike.

Tell Me A Fable

I was trying to read the triology before the arrival of Halo 3, but only made it a little over a third of the way there (i.e., a little bit into the second book). I’m now nearing the end of the second book, but I got Halo 3 a week ago, and am over half way though the campaign. The second book is basically a recounting of the campaign from the first Halo game with some side stories about the marines and Covenant thrown in. I use the words thrown in, but really, these side stories add a lot of depth to the story of the game. And speaking of depth, the first book tells the (nearly) entire backstory of the Master Chief (aka the big green guy); something that probably would have made a very boring game, but which works very well as a novel.

Speaking of boring games, though: In playing Halo 3, I have been made aware once more of what a poor job the games do of telling the story. The main characters in Halo 3 - the Master Chief and the Arbiter - are actually very deep (the latter actually more so than the former), but the campaign still feels like just another run through a bunch of levels, shooting/grenading/smacking everything in your way. That’s not to imply it lacks the fun factor that makes for a good game, but since I’d read the first book before playing any of Halo 3, I was really hoping that the power of the 360 would allow the story to be told in much more depth and with a greater level of emotion than the first Halo. The second Halo game did a somewhat decent job of weaving the story in, and actually making the game more than just a shooting gallery.

Unfortunately, Halo 3 feels like like a step backwards from Halo 2 with respect to the realization and illustration of the storyline. The levels are more varied and incorporate the use of strategy better than the previous two games (though Halo 2 did a good job of trying to make you think strategically), but the game so far hasn’t told the story of the Master Chief or the Arbiter (or Cortana or Gravemind) nearly as well as I’d hoped. And with only three and a half levels left, I’m worried (and relatively sure) it’s going to stay that way. I mean, Darth Revan reveals himself only halfway through KOTOR (warning: following the link may spoil that game if you haven’t played it).

Playing By The Book

What the book(s) did well in addition to expanding the story from the game was teach me how to play the game. No joke. Reading the descriptions of how Master Chief deals with the Covenant and the Flood in the book made me realize that each part of the game(s) is set up to try to get you to deal with a situation in a certain way. Of course, you don’t have to, but by recognizing strategic points in missions, I feel like my experience with Halo 3 has been enriched. I did notice this in some sections in the earlier games, but I’m not exactly Mr. Final Boss Owner, so I tended to just brute force my through a lot of parts in the first two Halo games, but in the third one, I feel like I’m playing with a lot more finesse and actually playing the game the way the designers intended it. And I know it’s not because of the improved storytelling (see above if you skipped over that part). And I know it’s not because of the improved graphics.

… The graphics are improved, and it does make the game better. That’s kind of a given and an expectation. But when the grunt’s methane tanks sputter and hiss when you hit them (something they didn’t do in the previous games), I notice the improvement because I read the books and know that they breathe methane and have those canisters strapped to their backs to survive.

Finely tuned ear muscles

Now, while I can assure you that not everything Timbaland touches turns to gold, I can assure you that I have been Jocking (yes, capital J - it’s currently #9 in the past 6 months according to last.fm/nwadycki) Apologize since this album came out in - as you can see above - March 2007. It’s just hitting the radio now. That does give you an idea of just how good the album it, though. It’s not without holes, but it’s one album that is definitely worth paying for (which, of course, is what I most certainly did), as opposed to a lot of other albums this year that I’m glad I was able to “preview” before buying.

On another Timbaland note, that Ayo Technology song would actually be pretty good if it didn’t have 50 Cent on it. It’s not necessarily a knock on 50, cause he’s made one or two good songs. That song just doesn’t suit him as well as it fits with New Justin. (Please note the clever use of suit and fit there)