Cameron

Hmm .. Apparently I'm the only person who thought last nights episode was pretty weak (weakest of the season). Nothing actually happened, it was all just setting stuff up for later. That in itself wouldn't normally bug me, but there's only 11 hours left, we don't have time for this nonsense! Cameron.

It is coming to Chicago .. and even though I like the show I'm going to skip the performance - unless I can do tequila shots with Jane Lynch Cameron.

Ok - the patent issue is complete garbage, but so is statements like this. What Xerox was doing at PARC was research, and a large amount of Apple stock was traded for in exchange for access (and use) of the research. Not to mention the huge amount of innovation Apple did over the Star interface.. But back to the patent thing - it's stupid. Software patents have been stupid since they were invented, and all they do is stifle innovation and hurt the consumers. This move by Apple is petty and childish, and puts even more attention on Android (which is really a pretty unexciting product anyway). Apple is the new Sony - a once great company producing amazing technology, that gets too big and too arrogant and ends up churning out crap. Sad, really. Cameron.

Looks like a nice addition to the park - but I can't help be a little sad that another traditional arcade is gone Cameron.

What's so awesome about the RS5, is that even the "normal" A5 looks fantastic - what an absolutely stunning car. Cameron.

Oh the kid is definitely Jacob, and he'll be an adult again soon enough. Larry, after that episode I have abandoned my space-craft theory, although when Nemesis/Locke had Sawyer in the cave and said "I need to show you something", I was so waiting for it to be the exterior hull, or bridge or something like that! Loved seeing Katey Segal again, I really like her character .. and alternate Ben and Rose were fun too. However I think we're pretty much done with Locke's alternate story, so I doubt we'll see them again; we need to get on with the story and the other characters and find out why everyone was brought to the island in the first place. My new theory is no-where near as fun, but I think a whole lot more likely. Nemesis is basically a genie who's been trapped in the bottle (the Island) for a long, long time. Jacob has been responsible for keeping him in that bottle .. but Jacob is now dead (for a short while anyway), and the genie (Nemesis) must act fast in order to escape. Sawyer is actually conning Nemesis, and that's exactly why Jacob brought him there .. Cameron.

BB is a fantastic *family* ride, and one of the very few at SFGAm. The Wiggles, Cartoon network, and Bugs Bunny areas are for little kids, and ONLY little kids. Appealing just to toddlers is no more "family" than appealing just to teenagers. BB is a ride that everyone can ride, and everyone can enjoy. Capacity is huge on it, which is why there's no line .. but this whole conversation really proves that coaster dorks will always find stuff to complain about "OH NO THERE'S NO LINE, UNBELIEVABLE - I ONLY LIKE STANDING IN LINE FOR 3 HOURS, NOTHING LESS". - Come on, people! The park needs more things like BB, more flat rides (large/thrilling, and small/fun) .. Little dipper is a great addition. If Chang does end up being installed there then it will be a bad move, the park already has plenty of coasters and Chang really offers nothing new - even though the coaster-teen-losers will all love being able to stand in line for 4 hours to ride a larger version of a ride that's already been there for 20 years (Iron Wolf). Of course then they'll complain that the line is too long and that SFGAm has horrible capacity and blaa blaa blaa blaa I know it's the off-season and a lot of you are board - but complaining about lack of lines .. really? That's all you can do now?. Us mid-westerners need to show the rest of the country that we're the coolest and most fun enthusiasts out there, and this thread really isn't helping our cause! Cameron.

Kate annoys me too .. she's like a a middle-school girl .. however I did like that scene with her and the guy in the auto garage (when they removed her cuffs). But the scene with Kate and Sawyer on the pier was just magic, I loved it! (Mostly because of Sawyer and what it revealed about him). OK here's my theory about the show - and I know it won't be popular - but you better keep your heads screwed on! The Island is a space-craft and Jacob and Nemesis (man in black, now playing Locke) are the pilots. They were sent to Earth thousands of years ago to study humans, and that's why Jacob has been bringing people to the Island. In the alternate time-line the Island is on the bottom of the sea because it (the space craft) sunk when the atom bomb went off. At the end of the season premier when the Nemesis (as Locke) said that he just wants to go home, he didn't mean off the Island - he meant off the planet. Smoke Monster might even be his native state. I mean "moving the island" is done by turning something that looks suspiciously like a giant steering wheel! Now either it looks like an Island because that was an explicitly selected disguise, or because it's been there so long that rock and trees have grown around it. I also think that we'll see the survivors leading better lives in the alternate timelines, to highlight their sacrifice on the Island (at the hands of Jacob and Nemesis). Cameron.

Great episode! Very emotional and not a lot of action, a daring move but very welcome change of pace. I love it Cameron.

^ The cell-phone ban is just stupid - I'm happy there's now proof that it doesn't make a difference. It also seems pointless to ban cell-phones when buses are driving around with giant video screens bolted to them which are *designed* to be distracting, not to mention the video bill-boards (bill-boards in general need to go away). Cameron.

^^ Ed I have always felt that the off-island scenes seem very out of place. I also agree that Jack is a total pussy I'm enjoying the duel timelines, and thought the episode last night was terrific. Nothing that was revealed was too much of a surprise for me, but it was still really well done. The rest of the season should kick ass, now with ninjas! Cameron.

This is a bit long, but I hope at least most of you read it You're more right than you think about that, Matthew, but of course you're not going to buy one, you're completely outside the target audience (Apple would rather you buy a laptop anyway, as their margins are much higher on one of those). Anyway, as a homework assignment for tonight, please read up on the "Baby Boomer Generation". I think a lot of people (including most of the press, oddly) has really missed what Apple is trying to do here. Most people (I'd say well over 90%) hate to use a computer. It's not that they don't understand it, or can't use it, it's just that the amount of time and effort involved in general maintenance has grown out of control. There are endless software and OS updates, service packs, DLLs, libgcc, virus signatures, "the certificate for this website has expired", a parade of dialog boxes and "balloons" constantly popping up warning about every little thing, more crap like will Word even open this Word Document; and don't get me started on backups. It's becoming insane, and like I said most people hate it. I'm no stranger to computer tinkering .. I was installing Slackware Linux onto old PCs (from stacks of floppies!) back in 1993, I've built Linux boxes from scratch (without using any distribution) as web servers, mail servers (sendmail and qmail), domain-name servers, etc. Yet even I'm tired of all the nonsense. I know it's not manly to say it but I like one-click updates! Almost daily when I use my computer I get some nag-screen about an application that wants to update itself. Then I have to sit there and wait while it downloads, blaa blaa blaa .. I just don't care, all I want is to run my freaking program! Apple knows this, and they're trying to address it. Well to be fair I reckon all the companies know this, but Apple is one of the few in position to experiment (they posted over $5 billion in revenue last quarter). The iPad is not a mini-laptop because it's not supposed to be a mini-laptop. Putting OSX on it would make it just as annoying as every other OSX (and Windows and Linux) machine out there. There isn't a single computer/os combination on the market now that is truly good and truly a pleasure to use. What comes the closest are the specialized machines like TiVo, XBOX360, Wii, etc, these are real embedded devices. The iPad is Apple's first step into making a general use "embedded device" like this, and their target isn't tech-geeks like us, it's everyone else. A lot of people have been complaining about missing features, but Apple very intentionally (and wisely) left all that crap out. It's funny to see the iPad compared to when the iPhone was released (and how that too was half-baked and didn't do much, and was really more of a technical demo - just like the iPad is). However I think a better comparison is with the original iMac. When the iMac was first announced in 1998 the press went crazy with much of the same stuff they're saying about the iPad (they even ridiculed the name!). Apple released the iMac with no floppy drives or serial or parallel ports, no way to open the case for upgrades, and Apple even ditched a lot of their own standard technology like ADB. Everything was USB, the keyboard, mouse, all peripherals, etc. The intent was to strip away all that crap and build a machine that was easier (and thus more pleasurable) to use. And it worked! While nerdy tech losers like us were all laughing at the iMac and its (growing) user-base, Apple was finally making money again, and starting down the road which lead to where they are today. The iPad is exactly the same. All that missing hardware has been intentionally left out, and I firmly believe that over time the iPad line will be able to function as the primary computer for many people. Take for example the SD Card slot - something that I also complained about before thinking about it for a bit. How would the SD Card work exactly? Would my content be split over multiple cards? Will I need a certain card to listen to song A, but then a different card to listen to song B - yikes, we'd be back to the floppy-disk nightmare again. On the other hand if it's "everything on one card" then how is it updated? Would I have to plug in an external card reader/writer so that I could transfer all my stuff from the old 8G card to the new 32G card? Or maybe I'll have to plug it into a computer to do it? Then there is the question of different brands of cards which perform differently. Forget that crap - I just want to buy the thing with the storage built-in, thanks. Adobe Flash - it's never going to happen. Never, ever, ever going to happen; but I'm sorry to say that it's not some grand conspiracy, it's far more simple (and obvious) than that. Apple is trying to make a device that is super stable - the stability has to be such that people don't even think about how stable it is. No crashing, no rebooting, everything (every single piece of software and hardware) working *perfectly* together. In order to do that Apple needs to be in complete control of every single line of code that runs on the device. They don't have to write it all (and they didn't - much of the core OS is open-source, you can build and run Darwin on any PC), but they have to control it. Flash is a huge wild-card, and under OSX it is the single largest source of application crashes. There's no way Apple is going to let that onto their super-deluxe-mega-ultra-stable device. Hulu (and all the similar sites) are *video* sites, not Flash sites, they will switch to HTML5 soon enough. Those sites don't care one bit what the delivery method is, they'll just use the most popular one available. When Firefox was first released everyone was screaming that it didn't render a large percentage of websites correctly. The reason was that Firefox was designed to be a standards compliant browser, while IE was this big horrible mess of bugs and nastiness. There were loads of blogs and articles written saying that Firefox will never catch on because none of the websites worked, and they will have no choice but to emulate IE. Well Firefox stood their ground, and people used it anyway because it was small, fast, and secure. Gradually websites started to be fixed so that they complied with the standards (and thus worked with Firefox), and so as more sites worked with Firefox, more people used it, and as more people used it more sites were fixed, etc etc etc. The same will happen with the transition from Flash video to HTML5 (which mobile Safari, Firefox and probably the latest IE already support), but someone has to make that first step. And as for games, well do you really need 50-billion poorly implemented copies of Bejeweled? Now all that said, I still think the iPad (as released) is a little half-baked. The biggest thing is lack of multi-tasking (for third-party apps). Although most "normal" computer users don't understand what multi-tasking is (or care), they will likely get annoyed at not being able to run AIM at the same time as anything else. However I think that will change, maybe not with OS3.2, maybe not with 4.0, but sometime soon (my bet is on the next rev). I also question why the iWork applications were selected to be among the first Apple apps released, they don't seem to really match the target audience. But all that aside, I do think this will be a successful product, and I think it's the start of an entire amazing line of products that is desperately needed. Computers now are more painful to use than riding an SLC with a hangover, and it's great to see that someone is finally in a position to take that first (baby) step in trying to change things. Apple will go on to release new (and better) iPads, and other companies will release their own versions (I can't wait for the first Android one); and gradually (hopefully) the current computing horror-show will fall into the halls of history. Cameron.

That Volvo system is great from a pure technical perspective, but do we really need to give people another reason to not concentrate on driving? I'm of the belief that stick-shift should become the standard once again, as stick drivers tend to be much less distracted. You can't eat cereal and do your make-up, while sending e-mail and watching Jersey Shore while driving a stick. Driving is serious and dangerous; the easier it is to forget that, the more people will be killed. Cameron.

What really lets it down (in my opinion) is the software. Now I fully expect some more stuff added with OS4.0, but I'm curious as to why Apple didn't delay the tablet until 4.0 is ready? Right now it really looks half-assed. When the iPhone came out it was only about 70% done, but still broke all sorts of new ground. The tablet just seems to do less than the iPhone (I know it doesn't, it just seems that way). In the keynote Jobs was saying that the iPad browses the web and does e-mail better than a laptop, well I just don't see that at all. When the iPhone was released he said it did those things better than other smart-phones, which was completely true .. sure it didn't do everything, but what it did it did amazingly well. The tablet also doesn't do everything (which is OK), but what it does do it only does in a very average way. I mean is Safari on the tablet able to open more than 8 tabs? Will Mail actually support rules or filter junk mail (and will the junk mail information sync with your OSX/Windows machine)? I'm guessing no on all counts - and that makes it pretty much unusable for anything serious. These limitations are fine (for now) on the iPhone, but the whole idea of the tablet is that it's supposed to be used more than the phone (and less than a laptop); however I can't see using this any more than I currently use the phone. Maybe version 2 will be better, maybe OS 4.0 will be better, but what they have now seems to be just the tiniest of steps away from the iPhone, yet still a huge chasm away from a laptop. It needs to be closer to the middle (heck even just a quarter of the way would be amazing). What makes it even more disappointing is that the hardware really does look stunning (both the electronics and the form-factor), and I bet it feels amazing to hold and use. Like Wes I'm interested in the iBooks side of things, and I'd love to retire my "couch laptop" in favor of the iPad, I just don't see it at this stage. Cameron.

1) My initial thoughts are positive. This is probably the most popular enthusiast site around, having official membership can only be a good thing. Keeping all the current access available to non-premium members is the most important part of it. 2) If anything, I think you could offer less (and lower the price a bit) and it would still be an excellent deal. 3) It totally interests me. 4) N/A 5) My only comments involve things like "An initial membership packet that will include some nice TPR goodies". My biggest beef always with memberships and clubs is the endless stream of stuff arriving in my mailbox (both physical and electronic). My ideal format for a TPR premium membership would be to receive a simple ID card, but nothing else. I'm not interested in newsletters (typically full of old news), or goodies or anything else (this is true of all clubs, AAA is a really bad offender). I would rather see 100% of the membership fees go towards the site and park/merchandise/event discounts, which are things I actively want. Now I know all this extra stuff is usually very popular, so I'm probably in the minority, but that's fine. It won't change my mind about joining. Cameron.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

Did you get to go tobogganing today?! Cameron.

Pinball Wizard! is a fun little video pinball game for iPhone. It was designed by John Popadiuk, who worked on some great late 90s Williams/Bally games such as World Cup Soccer, Theater Of Magic, Tales Of The Arabian Nights, Cirqus Voltaire (clearly is absolute and most awesome game!), and Star Wars Episode 1. Pinball Wizard is just the first step towards more full-featured pinball stuff for iPhone, including a construction set. Cameron.

^^ I don't think Avalanche is under-rated, as everyone who rides it seems to rave about. Now I do agree that it certainly doesn't get talked about much, but that's likely due to it being so out of the way. By contrast however, Mt. O is extremely over-rated, which boggles my mind as I can't stand the place. Cameron. [Edit to make this post resemble English..]

Sure, the same 2% of the population probably still does download music illegally, but the other 98% downloads legally, and there's a crapload of money to be made there. (I totally made up those numbers, but you get the point). What about people who die driving because they fall asleep, or at level crossings (trains) .. should level crossings be illegal too? Do you realize how much money it would cost to turn every level crossing in the country into a bridge? We'd have to find something that people really, really like and tax it .. perhaps weed?! I agree that some people can't handle pot, but lots of people can't handle alcohol, or sugar, or even eating! It is unrealistic (and unfair) to suggest banning something just because some people can't deal with it. Cameron.

^^^ I'm the same way, I can't stand smoking in any form. I actively like the affects of pot, but almost never smoke it simply because I hate smoking so much. I don't have any problems with other people smoking, so put me down in the "should be legal" column. Yes ... how many times do you think cops have to bust-up "pot-head" brawls, compared to the number of *drunken* brawls? (I'm by no means suggesting making alcohol illegal). I know you mean well, and get fed stuff like this through DARE and other programs, but you're really not in a position to comment on KrakenKing's situation. Many people turn to caffeine, or alcohol, or sugar, or prozac/xanax, etc to help them cope with various situations, it's not something that should be mocked or looked down upon. For example, I need Claritin because of my allergies. Too much snow-skiing will ruin your knees, too much sitting (or standing) will give you hemorrhoids, too much citrus can give you kidney stones, too much weigh-lifting can stunt your growth .. anything can be bad for you if you totally over-do it. The idea is MODERATION. Making pot legal doesn't suddenly create a world of pot-heads, a person with an out of control and addictive personality is going to have problems with any substance (legal or not). We should just make people illegal and be done with it, the Universe would be a much better place Cameron.

Live stream video from an iPhone 3G or 3GS to the web: uStream iPhone App - FINALLY! Last week I thought about posting a link to the new Knocking Live app, which is iPhone to iPhone video streaming, but I was really hoping that the uStream app would be approved; it's been floating around jail-broken phones for about a year now, but it's finally been approved for the app store. I hope to see TPR members using this a lot during the upcoming coaster season for Streaming Trip Reports. Cameron. PS: It's free, too.

^ The entire first five seasons can also be streamed over Netflix. I had never watched Lost but heard a lot about it, so I sat down late this summer and started with the pilot. I watched all 5 seasons, and agree that it's a great show (well season 3 and 4 seemed a bit forced). Really looking forward to season 6 in February. Cameron.

Oh man, absolutely fantastic news!

One I've been waiting for: Stair Dismount. This was a web game around 2001/2002 and was tremendous fun. Basically you push a guy down a flight of stairs, and get points based upon the damage that is inflicted. You choose where on the body to push, and the strength or the push, and then physics does the rest. You can re-watch your most resent fall, and even send snap-shots through e-mail or post them to Facebook. Hate your boss? Well then just stick his face on the Dismountee and go to town! If all that isn't enough, the sounds alone are .. well .. killer Cameron.