One app that I had never heard of until a friend mentioned it is Google’s own My Tracks. In a word, this app is awesome.

I should also mention, My Tracks is also available for iPhone but I have not used it on that platform yet so my focus here is on the Android version.

In a nutshell, the app can record your movement, or “tracks” using GPS and then allows you to share the map on Google Maps for others to see (or not.)

When you record your track, you can set markers for landmarks or points of interest along the way. So for example, say you take a hike in the woods and find something really cool like an old abandoned car, you can tag that spot with a marker and give it a description and it will be easier for others to find.

This functionality has made it a useful app for geocaching and some folks are even using it to track locations of shipwrecks.

Another use for this application is for fitness – runners, walkers, bikers etc.

While not explicitly designed for runners like Nike+, using Google’s My Tracks app does not require any special sensors or special shoes since it relies on a GPS signal to plot it’s data. And it is hard to beat the price as My Tracks is free.

The screenshot to the left shows a stats view from a track I recorded walking around Plainsboro Preserve. It shows distance traveled, time, pace etc all interesting. It also shows elevation statistics such as high, low, gain etc. Unfortunately though from researching that aspect it seems that GPS accuracy is less than ideal.

I have been using the app quite a bit just walking/jogging to see how my pace is compared to a previous time. I can keep multiple track recordings on my Android phone to compare information and determine if I am making any improvement in my pace and with some basic math figure out an estimate of calories burned if I wanted to.

A cool feature I mentioned briefly above is the ability to share the track you recorded. Say you went for an off-the-trail hike in the woods, found some nice sights and wanted your friends to be able to re-trace your path? Well you can have the app send the track via email to your friends, or share it to Google’s own Google Maps service and from there set the map to public or private. Sadly no option to save it to any third-party sites such as Facebook or Twitter, though I suppose there might be a reason for that.

Here is an uploaded track I recorded on Google Maps.

On the map you will notice I set some markers such as “Maggie’s Trail” – every time you set a marker on the mobile My Tracks app it also stores metadata on the cell phone signal quality, carrier, tower etc. Most likely not too interesting to you unless you are a pretty hardcore geek (which some of us are lol.)

There are probably other uses I will figure out over time, but as it is now this is quite a useful and fun app.

Definitely worth a download from the Android Market .

–Jon

Foursquare's home page

I consider myself adventurous when it comes to new interactive services and usually always try out the next “new” thing if anything just to satisfy my curiosity. It is always an interesting journey to see what ideas take off and which ones flounder into obscurity.

My most recent experiment is the location-based social networking service Foursquare. While not bleeding-edge brand new (it launched sometime in Spring 2009) it has really gained some momentum lately and some friends of mine started using it so I figured what the hell and signed up to give it a spin.

An added bonus was when I discovered they had an Android app. As a recent convert to the world of Android this past May when I bought my HTC Droid Incredible I figured this would be a nice experiment to see how well they implemented this service on both web and handheld.

In a nutshell, Foursquare allows you to post, or “check-in” at a location to say you visited, see who else has visited, and who has visited that venue the most (the “mayor”) as well as leave tips or shouts about a venue, ie “Try the Triumph burger it is for the win!”

Visiting a location frequently or visiting a certain number of different venues unlocks profile badges. One badge for example is called Local and is awarded for checking into the same venue three times in one week.

Foursquare profile page

Right now it is sink or swim for them. When they were little no one heard of them. Now that they are pushing 2 million users they are on the radar of all the big guys – Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

Now getting back to the basics of Foursquare – as it stands right now other than it being yet another social network to have to keep tabs on, I have not found a real benefit or value to using it at this time.

It is a simple question that I have not found an answer for yet – for what reason should I use Foursquare?

I have been browsing profiles on Foursquare to see who is doing what and I have come to the conclusion that many people fit into two camps. People like myself giving it a try out of curiosity and people who are egotistical nerd super-achievers who are mayors of like a dozen locations and have many hundreds of check-ins and badges.

Right now though it seems the balance of value is on Foursquare’s side. They get all this absolutely delicious location-specific data from their users that marketers would be delighted to buy access to. They have people willingly going to venues and saying I was here at this time.

I am not really into badge collecting. I am not one for wanting people to be right on my tracks so I don’t turn on stuff on my phone that lets most people know where I am at any given time. And I don’t see the point of checking in to places I visit right now.

None of this is to say the service is awful or bad or that it has no potential – quite the contrary. I think a location-based service such as Foursquare has huge potential but right now it seems they are missing the mark.

The bread & butter of their service will be the mobile apps. For the most part their web site is not even really needed other than as a desktop portal.

With that in mind let’s check out the Android app. (Note that they also make apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Palm as well.)

When you launch the app, the first screen you get shown is the “friend screen” – I understand why they did this but as you can see in my screenshot this screen is nearly useless. Out of the few friends I have added, only Jeff has his app/phone set to show his current location.

I would have either made the screen more user-specific – ie you see only recent friend check-ins nearby or even better (at least in my opinion) I would have made the default screen a “places near my location” type of deal. As they add more features to the service they could even make the main entry view more of a portal such as showing a restaurant near you that is having a special a special on wings for every run the Yankees score tonight or the museum nearby is offering half-off today. Or even the local library promoting a reading event.

There is a lot of room to enhance the places view as well.

For example, in this screenshot from my phone on the left imagine how much more useful it would be if it had star ratings right on this screen. Not just one either – like one from users, maybe one from Zagats, AAA or some other relevant service.

So a scenario would be I am in city visiting for work or whatever, I’d pull out my phone, fire up the app, give the GPS a moment to lock in my location and pull on the list and say “oh look a 5-star burger joint is only 100 meters up the road.” Or say I am out at 3 am with some friends and I want to find a place that is actually open, give me a preference to filter places to show places to eat that are within 1000 meters and open at this very moment.
 
Hell they could even cross-market or partner with someone like Urbanspoon or Yelp to get some venue-specific data if needed.

The venue screen to the left is a prime example of an under-utilized screen. Not only could they have the ratings I mentioned earlier there, they could/should feature relevant data such as phone number, hours, etc. There is another tab called Tips that has user-submitted blurbs but most venues have very few if any.

One of the downsides to allowing people to add venues is that there is a lot of shady data. One pizza place near me exists in the database three times – because three people added it with differently spelled names.

Superusers (the most active users) can supposedly edit the venues now but as I am not a superuser I am unable to see how this works or if I can merge multiple listings into one.

Another issue is people adding their own house. In the suburbs it is not as bad but in a city like NYC with some tall vertical residences you end up with stacks of peoples’ homes mixed in with the legit listings. I don’t know Omar or David nor do I care to know they live at XYZ and I doubt I will be checking in there.

I understand why they allowed people to add venues, but it seems to me they lost some of their control in doing so.

I found the maps for venues to not always be accurate either which I am guessing has a lot to do with random users adding said venues. If you go to add a venue and your GPS is off by a 50 meters or so the map rendering itself won’t be correct.

Fortunately most venues I have checked into are in their proper place, but I have found a few that are not and as far as I can see there is no way through the app to report a venue as being inappropriate, closed, or erroneous in some way.

Even a simple button to click and report it so that they could at least follow up somehow or just remove a venue if it turns out it does not belong and help them maintain better data integrity. Nothing can be more terrible for a service like this than invalid or irrelevant data. People are impatient and if they encounter it often enough they might say hell with it and not use Foursquare.

This final screenshot here shows the actual venue check-in screen.

This is where you see how they tie in with other social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Some folks may choose to broadcast this info out to their accounts and friends. Others won’t. All comes down to one’s own personal privacy preferences.

Location-aware services are still in their infancy and we are rapidly learning about how they can open up a whole other can of worms for privacy and safety.

For example, earlier this year a site named Please Rob Me threw together a page to show when people were not at home based on their updates to Foursquare and other social networking services.

Anytime you share info about yourself or friends on the web you are compromising your privacy some. It is up to each and every one of us where we the line is for too much sharing.

A service such as Foursquare is not exactly without privacy issues itself either.

So what’s the verdict? It is a decent concept and implementation but it is rough around the edges.

For me it is that the service does not offer me enough of a benefit to use it at this time. As the disclaimer goes though, your mileage may vary and judging by some of the profiles I have seen there are no doubt some very active, content users.

I think we will see a lot coming out of the Foursquare folks in the coming months. Their service shows a lot of promise. For now I am keeping my account on there but probably won’t be actively checking in to anything.

Hopefully they will give me something cool to write about in the near future.

Cheers,
–Jon

I decided to go through some old CD’s and Zip disks I had stashed away and came across some old-school stuff, including this gem:

Welcome to Netscape

That there is the “Welcome” screen from version 1 (actually 1.1) of Netscape Navigator. Sir Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the World Wide Web, but Netscape Navigator is pretty much the browser that changed the world. I know that sounds like a really bold statement, but it is the truth. This browser almost launched the “new economy” by itself.

The highly successful IPO of Netscape Communications led to a huge influx of capital and creation of tens of millions of jobs in a virtual gold rush with companies trying to out-innovate each other for the next big thing. 16 years later and trillions of dollars of economic activity later it is almost just a footnote in the history books now but Netscape Communications deserves full credit for launching the New Media revolution.

Without getting into a whole history lesson, Mosaic Communications (which went on to become Netscape Communications, then gobbled up by AOL in 1998) had the first successful commercial web browser, Netscape Navigator, which was based off of NCSA Mosaic, a project developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain, among them Marc Andreesen who co-founded Netscape with SGI co-founder Jim Clark.

Finding the program for this browser was a real treat for me. As someone who got my start in technology at the dawn of the dotcom era, it really brought me back to the exciting beginnings of the web. It brought me back to the days of hacking HTML trying to make shit work, the days of worrying about the size of gif files and making sure they do not take more than a few minutes to download on our 14.4 baud modems. The days of having to actually submit your site to Yahoo in hopes they would include it in their directory.

Looking back I feel privileged to have been a part of this – working in the industry when it was just taking it’s first baby steps. Sometimes looking back I still can’t believe how far things have come and how fast. Now we do full-blown video, animation, games etc over the web on cell phones and other portable devices at speeds that are mind boggling.

So back to the browser – I went to run it (this version did not have an installer – it was a self-contained single executable) but it did not want to run on Windows 7 64-bit. Tried setting compatibility modes etc and still could not get it to run.

Copied it to a Vista 32-bit machine and that did the trick.

HTTP header errors when visitiong Yahoo

So I run the program and first thing you see is that the interface has a lot of the same basic features as they do now. You have the toolbar with forward and back buttons, home, stop etc. At the bottom you have the progress bar which would also show you the URL of a link you mouse over. About the only thing this version did not have in the interface that is standard now is the URL bar where you can type in a URL to visit. To visit a URL you had to go to the file menu and select open location.

First site I tried since it was one of the oldest was Yahoo.com but it did not work. I got the error above which looks like it is simply a case of an old browser not supporting the needed HTTP header.

I found that trying most sites it simply did not work. If I did not get that error I got other errors about supported character sets (this browser did not support UTF-8 or other unicode formats) or the browser simply did not have a handler for a given file type.

So failing that, I went on to play with the navigation buttons Net Search and Net Directory.

These options also brought up some neat old-school web stuff.

Netscape's selection of search engines.

First button I tried was Net Search which brought up a page with links and descriptions of the few web sites one could use to search the web at the time.

This is really amazing because not only is this pre-Google, but it is pre-Yahoo as well. At this point in history Yahoo was a hierarchical directory of sites and Google was still a couple years away.

At this point in time there were really just a handful of options for searching the web – among them AltaVista, Lycos, and WebCrawler.

All three of these domain names still seem to work but none of them are their original owners anymore and for the most part have changed drastically where one could say they are simply just the the same names and that is about it.

In this screenshot one thing that I noticed was this list pre-dated Lycos even being a commercial entity. The URL on the bottom when I moused over the link shows it’s original URL from when it was a still a research project at Carnegie Mellon University.

Web directories in Netscape Navigator.

Next on my little journey down memory lane was the Net Directory button. Interesting how we used to delineate between the two methods of finding sites – “search” and “directory.” I think these days due to the sheer volume of content on the web and the pace of change, hierarchical directories of sites are all but gone other than perhaps DMOZ.

Like the Net Search button, Net Directory brought up a page with some links to directories of sites, most notable among them being Yahoo.

This page REALLY shows how young (and small) the web was compared to now. When I moused over the link for Yahoo it shows their original URL before co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang incorporated Yahoo as a business – akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo – where you could browse through the directory of 13,000 pages.

Contrast those 13,000 pages to now – even a simple Google search with the keyword “USA” returns 741,000,000 pages. The exponential increase in availability of information online is almost hard to grasp.

–Jon

After almost 12 years waiting this was a welcome screen.

I have been playing the beta for StarCraft 2 for a bit now but have not had a chance to write about it until now. After waiting nearly 12 years for this game to come out I’d hope you could forgive me for being too busy playing it to write about it.

This is the refined login screen to play StarCraft 2 on Battle.net

While I mentioned in a post about Command & Conquer 3 a couple years back that I felt many of the real-time strategy games had kind of evolved to re-skins of previous versions, at first glance that is what one may think when they first fire up SC2. Many of our old favorite units are in fact in SC2 and re-skinned such as the Protoss carriers, Terran siege tanks, Zerg ultralisks etc.

But there is much more to this game than a simple re-skinning, even though I will admit I am in absolute awe of the graphical beauty of this game especially with all the video options at ultra, I am going to focus more on the newer stuff.

The first major change you will see right from the beginning you can see Blizzard built this game around the online experience tying into the company’s flagship online gaming platform, Battle.net, which they originally introduced way back in 1997 for the original Diablo. Battle.net has since evolved to be the platform for all of Blizzard’s titles including World of Warcraft and now SC2.

Battle.net in it’s current incarnation serves as an authentication and matchmaking platform as well as competitive arena, but I expect to see many more changes unveiled over the coming months.

The matchmaking as it currently stands I am guessing is not as good as it will eventually be as the system gets more data to work with since most nights there are typically only 3,500 players or so on in the beta. So far I have found it quite poor at finding suitable matches for me based on skill. I have had 2v2 matches where my team was shown to be favored and we get blown out and other matches where the other side was favored and we decimated them.

Add a friend on Battle.net - you can add them by their SC2 name.identifier or their Real ID (which is often an email address)

Blizzard’s intent behind the new Battle.net seems to be leading toward making it into a full-blown social networking platform for players of their games.

For one, when Battle.net 2 as it is being called finally goes live, players of all Blizzard games will be able to chat across games. You could be in a skirmish match in StarCraft 2 and whisper a friend who is raiding Icecrown Citadel in WoW.

They have also mentioned that you will be able to unlock achievements, badges, emblems etc for your profile (similar to XBox Live) so the truly exceptional competitors will be able to display their accomplishments.

I wonder if they will eventually do something with StarCraft 2 profiles as they have done on the World of Warcraft armory where you can look up a particular player on the armory web site to see their achievements etc, and even subscribe to an RSS feed if you are one of those obsessive stalking types.

Profile Screen showing ranking, achievements, recent match history, etc.

In the first StarCraft forming up a custom game with a group of friends required you to create the game and set a password and have everyone join up and then you can start it up. StarCraft 2 is not so different but a changed a little bit. Someone can invite multiple people to a “party” that can join games as a group and play as allies, teams, free-for-all etc.

Once invited by a host to a game you end up in the game lobby screen where players pick their races, the map, and the handicap and you are set. If someone in the game does not have the map, it downloads it to them and on the loading screen for the game it will show which team/player is favored and who is downloading the map if anyone is.

The game lobby screen - select race, unit color, handicap, and map.

Right now my only complaint and it is a minor one is that the Battle.net interface still does not seem very friendly. Some of the options due to it being beta are ghosted as unavailable, but then some of the options that are currently accessible are not quite straightforward. Many sections of the user interface do not have text labels, but are rather generic looking icons that one has to mouseover to determine what they do. I imagine over time and familiarity it will become second nature but I found the user interface to be the one thing that really needs improvement.

Gameplay while similar to the old StarCraft seems to be less around the rush and more about resource management. Yeah if someone is slow and does not build any offensive units early on you may get them with a rush, though on some maps this is not too easy as the only land access to a base may be blocked by debris that actually has to be destroyed (and has a decent amount of hit points to boot.) While I have found that it is much harder to be rushed than previously, defensive structures such as cannons, turrets etc seem to be less effective than in the past.

I remember a common Protoss strategy I had in the original game was to use cannons to lock in someone. I’d create some pylons and cannons near a resource field close to their base to keep them from being able to build there too easily. I have tried that strategy in SC2 but so far found it ineffective as even a handful of decent ground units can rip them up.

My protoss forces mounting for an assault. Someone is going to get OWNED by this lol

Some folks will likely beg to differ, but I honestly do not see any racial balance issues. Blizzard has done as usual a fine job keeping the playing field level. Any unit that can be perceived to be overpowered usually has some counter. And some of the units from the original StarCraft that were quite potent have been nerfed since then such as the Protoss carriers which now hold only four drones as opposed to eight (post-upgrade at Fleet Beacon) which was kind of a bummer. Anyone who has played Protoss will tell you how much fun it was to send in a dozen fully upgraded carriers in to decimate an enemy base.

One thing I wish I could write about is the single player campaigns, but unfortunately they are not in the beta at this time. Part of me hopes they do not put them in beta so that they will be a surprise. I am sure they will be quite enjoyable.

In the mean time I am quite enjoying the multiplayer skirmishes on Battle.net. Should you get beta feel free to add me, Griggsy.sctwo.

Cheers,
–Jon

Like any other Apple device it has generated a lot of buzz. Some early reviews have been quite positive and others were more measured.

The more I thought about it as a device though, the more I began to think of it as going down a path I am not sure I want to go down.

One of the things many of us take for granted with our computers is the ability to install what software we want when we want. You buy a Windows machine, a Mac, or a Linux box and you can go on the Internet, download freeware/shareware, or buy commercial apps, install them, etc.

Contrast that to a device such as an iPhone (and many other phones for that matter) that require applications to be digitally signed before they can install and run on the device.

In our phones this has been par for the course under the guise of it being in our best interests so that when we need to count on the phone it works (though it is likely in the interest of carriers to keep certain apps from interfering with their lucrative business.)

But for our actual computers this has never been the model. We have always had the “freedom to tinker” with our PC’s.

While some folks are quick to point out that the iPad is basically a larger and enhanced iPhone, the cynical side of me thinks this is a gateway device to Apple (or other large companies) being able to change the locks on our digital front doors.

What if the next generation of Macs and Mac OS X used an app store model and required signed apps? What if Microsoft Windows adopts a similar model in order to “keep us safe” from all the malware?

Of course this is all what if’s at this point, but there has been a trend with corporations like Apple, Microsoft etc acting more and more like gatekeepers of content and information. Look at what happened with Amazon’s Kindle. It had it’s own beacon of irony when they remotely removed Orwell’s “1984″ off of users’ Kindle readers.

Even Apple’s app store is not without it’s own controversy. Many developers have cited Apple for their glaring inconsistencies in the approval process and in some cases exercising some behavior that seems to be anti-competitive such as removing applications from the app store for mentioning competitor’s services or in some cases denying approval to an app such as Google Voice.

Sure one could say this is all tin-foil hat territory and that I am reading too much into it but am I really?

Guess only time will tell. Either way I have to admit I do like what I see in the device from a technology and user experience standpoint. My only hope is that Apple is more open with the platform and more forthcoming with the application approval process than they have been with the iPhone.

UPDATE – Somehow I missed this when digging around but it seems the Free Software Foundation has some similar concerns.

–Jon

Unfortunately, I got to experience first hand a significant hardware failure on my Windows XP machine, Megatron (yes, all of my computers on our home LAN are named after fictional characters from TV, movies, mythology, etc.) I have had machines fail before and usually I have been able to salvage them, but this one was different as it seems it completely “fried” itself – the connector from the power supply to the motherboard had actually melted, and the connector from power supply to the nVidia GeForce 7900 was melted as well. Turning on the machine, the fans would spin up, but the board would not do any of the POST beeps, and the hard drive would spin up, but the operating system would not boot, and my monitor showed it was getting no signal.

Not wanting to be bothered I figured I would just forget about it. But after a few short weeks I kept finding times where I needed to have a Windows machine. One night a bunch of the guys were playing Counter Strike: Source but running it on OS X is kind of pain so I did not bother. Another night I needed to test out this database GUI app but it only ran on Windows.

Yes, I am still a proud Mac user, but as a software/web developer and gaming geek I would be remiss not to have multiple platforms available to me. Any given day working in the information technology field I may spend time in Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or Solaris.

It goes without saying that my Windows XP box was a part of my workflow and entertainment more than I had realized so I decided to rebuild it.

Megatron was a good, reliable machine for a few years. It had a nice Asus motherboard with an Intel Core2 Duo CPU, good hard drives, 4GB RAM, etc. Most of the components were premium.

Sadly though, the cost for replacing a lot of the Intel components is not cheap and I was reluctant to buy previous generation items or end of life items that may not be supported in the coming years.

So I opted to build a new rig – Gigantor – built based on the AMD platform this time. AMD has really come a long way over the years. Their performance is comparable to Intel’s offerings, but at a much better price point. I wanted a high-performance machine but on a budget and the economics of the AMD platform worked out well.

Once I decided on the platform, the rest was easy to fill in based on research and word of mouth.

Here is the rundown of the components (pictured at top of post):

MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard (solid socket AM3 board, DDR3 RAM support, loads of goodies)

AMD Phenom 2 955 black edition (AMD’s current top-of-the-line quad core CPU)

Corsair 750 watt power supply (great reviews – my only complaint is that the cables are a pain in the ass)

OCZ Platinum AMD Edition 4GB DDR3 1600 RAM (really nice, fast RAM – currently running at a conservative 1333 6-6-6-24 timing)

HIS Radeon 4890 1GB graphic card (all I can say is this thing is a BEAST)

Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI-E sound card (for some reason most onboard sound cards still suck after all these years)

Pair of Western Digital Caviar 1TB drives (RAID 1 mirror at the moment – eventually moving boot drive to SSD)

Lian Li black aluminum case (great cases but the documentation is BRUTAL – all written in Engrish lol)

Thermalright TRUE heat sink (due to ordering issues I subbed in a Zalman until the TRUE arrived)

All of these components probably retail for $1,500 or so but with rebates, sales, coupons, and some leftover credit on PayPal I think it was all under $900 bucks, which of course I will write off on my taxes next year.

One thing I did not order (completely forgot) was an OEM Windows license. My previous XP license had been activated many times, and I did not want to mess around with XP on bleeding edge hardware, and I hate Vista so I went an alternate route and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate (I will write up more on this experience later) and it has worked well.

So here is the machine is all built:

The inside of the case has good airflow, and the fans are pretty quiet. At idle my CPU cores are measuring at 28 degrees celcius and under 100% load about 55 degrees celcius which is not bad for air cooling.

Only a couple of annoyances in this process – one was all the extra cables from the Corsair power supply that as you can see in the picture above I stashed in the unused optical drive bays, and the other would be the tiny connectors from the motherboard to the case. They never label them well, and sometimes the pins are not an even match, ie connector might have four pins, but cable only needs three.

Other than that, it has been a smooth experience.

–Jon

The thought of Cliffwood Beach as a resort community was always beyond me. Through my childhood years there it always seemed to me like just your typical middle-class blue-collar family town. Sure, we had beaches but not many would go swimming in the bay being that it was so polluted. And there really was not much to do down at the beach other than look across at New York or set off illegal fireworks.

But the fact is that throughout the 1950′s Cliffwood Beach was a popular resort community on the NJ shore. It featured a board walk, a saltwater swimming pool, a restaurant, and some amusements. Every summer people throughout the area would gather to enjoy their beautiful summer days at this Raritan Bay community.

This came to an abrupt end in September 1960 when Hurricane Donna came ripping through and pretty much erased the resort area off the map.

I remember hearing stories from family members about the pool and the boardwalk, and the restaurant etc but there was pretty much no trace it ever existed other the stories that were passed down. I had been all over the town as a kid and up and down the length of the beach. Yet still nothing.

Last summer (2008) I decided to go back to my childhood stomping grounds to see if I could find anything that would give me clues to the town’s history as a resort. I really did not see anything other than some old wood from piers (pictured on left) which may or may not have been part of the boardwalk. Still working on determining that.

Despite my best efforts though, I could not determine where the pool was. People I had spoke to told me the general location of where to find it but no dice. A few teens I talked to down at the beach were not much help either.

On a whim I decided to look at some aerial views via Google Earth and almost immediately something jumped out at me – a wooded rectangular area right near the beach. (Highlighted in image to the left – click to enlarge.)

What made this location fitting was it’s proximity to the Green Acres park which apparently was built in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Unfortunately due to being too busy, it has been almost a year, but I FINALLY managed to make a return trip to Cliffwood. I set out right for the rectangular area in the Google Earth aerial and the image to the left is what greeted me. For being so close to the beach it was actually quite grown in with mature growth – trees, plants, etc.

Once I walked up the sandy path a little more to get closer to the overgrown area I immediately saw this aqua-colored outline of what was probably the top edge of the concrete outer wall of the pool. The paint was peeling, but surprisingly intact considering it has been almost 50 years since this pool last saw any use.

Here is a closer view of the top of the wall. As you can see, the color is quite bright and hard not to notice. Once I looked in the right area, the remains of this swimming pool were actually quite easy to find, though I think if you walked by this area regularly you probably would not have any idea unless you were specifically looking for it. The pool itself seems to be completely filled in with soil or sand, and is completely overgrown with vegetation. I am not sure if this was just a natural occurrence or if done by the town to avoid having to deal with it. Either way, it is quite hidden and it was pretty cool to find it.

–Jon

So going forward I am going to completely avoid politics as a subject around here. People who know me know where I stand, and if I do get the itch to write about politics I will likely post on a more appropriate site such as OpenLeft.

I am also going to remove all of my previous politically-oriented posts from this site. No, I am not hiding nor am I ashamed of what I have said, but I am doing so because I want this site to be a place to share and discuss fun stuff that I enjoy in life. Stuff like geeky tech gadgets, toys, cars, home projects, food, music, life, etc.

If someone is really interested in my previous political postings I have made here and since deleted, they can always use the WayBack Machine. Once you say something on the web these days you best be ready to stand by it because when it is out there, it is out there for good

Cheers,

–Jon

I can safely say I pretty much fucking hate spammers. If I did not sign up to be on a mailing list for XYZ, DON’T FUCKING TELL ME ABOUT IT.

It is kind of interesting the shit you see in your spam box. And surprisingly it is lacking in diversity as when going through it there are some themes that seem really common.

This got me to thinking, if somehow all email was archived in a cave somewhere, and the Earth got fucked up by a meteor or something, and email was the only way visitors from space got to learn about our society, what would they learn about us if they read the spam?

1. Apparently folks in our society do not need to go to college to get an education – all you have to do is pay some site and you will receive a degree. Obviously this makes you highly qualified.

2. All Canadian pharmacies sell only viagra, cialas, and oxycontin. And everyone needs this stuff.

3. College girls love to masturbate, but only on camera. And only if you visit their site because they have a crush on you. And you pay them money. Maybe they would not need the money if they went to item #1 above.

4. Everyone needs more credit cards. Especially ones from no-name banks with 30% interest rates. But it’s ok, everyone that applies gets one!

5. I am pretty certain if the spam is to be believed I am the only person in the US without a time share! I guess I am not a good member of society.

6. Everyone on Earth seems to have some serious fecal problems. All we need is colon cleanse. Colon cleanse should obviously be a part of your daily consumption as if it were another food group.

7. You should never pay for software, music, movies. You can always get it cheap from China. Everyone in the software and entertainment biz works for free!

8. There is a lot of money waiting for me. In an African bank. Just provide pertinent bank info and await the deposit!

9. No one drives to work anymore. We all work from home making $7,500-$10,000 dollars a month with our own franchises.

10. And last but not least, there must have been a major outbreak of small penis syndrome since obviously EVERYONE needs penis enlargement.

–Jon

I remember back in 1998 when StarCraft first came out that we would play it on the LAN in our office every evening when work was done for the day. Some of the games went late into the night and would be pretty heated. The best times were our 4 vs 4 games. These were the real battles. The rivalries and competitive drive would rival that of cross-town baseball teams. There would be shit-talking, name-calling, teasing, gloating etc. And we loved every bit of it.

Well, that is almost ten years ago, and while some may disagree with me, I have to say the genre has become stagnant over the last 6-7 years with most of the new titles being released either being a) shitty or b) minor upgrade/re-skin of an older title. Then you had good franchises that had a good title, but the factions were poorly balanced like in Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge. No one can tell me with a straight face that Yuri’s faction was balanced.

Enter Command & Conquer 3. C&C3 was released this past spring, but due to my ill-conceived assumptions that it would suck I did not get around to buying it until recently. In fact, if not for a trip to the Apple store and seeing it on the shelf I might not have tried it. But being that I am a happy Mac user who is experimenting with Mac gaming (improving but still has a long way to go) I decided to buy it for the hell of it.

Needless to say I was pleased. The game is fun. The artificial intelligence seems to be a HUGE improvement over previous titles in the franchise. And as far as graphics go this one is probably the biggest leap forward in an RTS game to date. In fact even on my Macbook Pro with it’s substantial specs, setting all the graphics options to full slowed the game down enough to be noticeable.

First thing I did was fire up some skirmish games to get a feel for it. Set up some games with me and three computer teammates versus four computer opponents. A cocky decision – I set the AI for my opponents to “brutal” – in Red Alert 2 I could man-handle brutal computer opponents even out-numbered. In Command & Conquer 3 I got curb-stomped pretty hard.

I had a base in the corner of the map with a substantial defensive setup and the AI was smart enough the find the one hole I had and exploit the hell out of it. I quickly learned that the artificial intelligence is not the same inept AI as in the past. No longer would they repeatedly zerg my most fortified points. At one point they even somehow managed to sneak this massive artillery unit into the thin strip of land behind my base on the border of the map to bombard the hell out of my power plants which brought my defensive systems down and enabled them to hit me from the front of my base as well. I pretty much got my ass handed to me.

Another cool option when setting up a skirmish game is that not only can you set the level of the AI for the computer opponents, but now you can set their style – ie. they can focus on all-out offensive rush, turtle-like defense, or balanced. Combine these factors with the difficulty, and the new handicap modifier the game has a substantial amount of room to customize the battle. Whether you want a near-impossible scenario, or a game where you fire it up and just romp all over the computer you can pretty much do it all.

As with other real-time strategy games, there are many web sites where you can download custom player-created maps to try out. Some are designed to give you unlimited resources so you can really give it to your opponent while others are designed to make it hard to attack the opposing bases by using landscape to create some natural defenses and choke points.

After a couple of weeks doing skirmishes and playing some online games I have started playing the single-player campaigns. So far so good. This is one of those areas where the Command & Conquer franchise has always done well. The storylines are fun and well-written and make the game feel much more alive. Seeing Michael Ironside and Billy Dee Williams among the actors in the game is kind of like an 80′s flashback, but cool although I must admit that I am somewhat biased since I am a fan of their work.

Between C&C3 and the announced StarCraft 2 it looks like the genre may be experiencing a bit of a renaissance.

–Jon