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5/8/2010

I saw the film Avatar recently. I really liked it and was just thrilled with the difference in scale between the world of the Na'vi and of humans. Everything was so lifelike. But, I couldn't help but think about Jurassic Park…

First of all, many of the animal sounds remind me of Velociraptors. Yeah. That's about my only complaint there. But, comparing this film to Jurassic Park. Back then, that film was pretty groundbreaking, but you could easily tell the difference between animatronic and CGI dinos (the animatronic ones had much more stable skin coloration and fit into the environment very well). What's funny is that even though I know that all the Na'vi characters were CGI, but at one point, one looked animatronic. It was the way he interacted with particles and dust on his skin. So realistically life like that it looked like it had to be real. When movies get to the point where you forget (or don't even consider) that such basic things as the world around the characters isn't real… it's just amazing what's being done now with this technology.


3/31/2010

I have an alarm clock that I never use. It's been with me since childhood. I once slept through that thing, incorporating it into a dream. I stopped using it because it started to scare me out of my sleep. It has such an abrupt (and loud) start! Being jarred awake by the screechy beeping was very horrific.

I fell in love with the alarm from my Nokia phones. It starts off soft, then slowly increases in volume. I'm such a light sleeper now that I often turn it off before it reaches its highest volume. I loved the alarm from my Nokia 6230 so much that I hunted it down to put on my iPhone. (We're still working on the nuances of volume control there…)

I've had a few experience with someone else's alarm clock. It's way loud and makes that *boop boop boop* sound. I was rather hating it until I realized that it also uses a ramping up volume. The bad thing is that it never stops. The Nokias I had would self-snooze after a few minutes of not being answered (unless my memory is mistaken and I unconsciously snoozed them, ha). I mean, it makes sense that the continuous tone, if it's not working isn't going to suddenly work as is evidenced by my sleeping through the alarm once and incorporating it into my dream.


3/27/2010

There are a few things that annoy me about the iPhone. Don't get me wrong, I love it. But it's not perfect.

Irritation number 1: Your app quits if you answer the phone. True, this could just be a minor annoyance—as long as your app is simple or properly saves its state. But if you're in the middle of doing something in an app that doesn't… Yeah. Major pain. What makes this even more frustrating is that you can be on the phone, then open up an app to do whatever. Would it be such a bad user experience to just bring up a floating overlay box that you can dismiss while leaving you in the app? That little return to phone call strip at the top of the screen could call up the overlay again.

Frustration number 2: You've been on the phone (or even just answered it), then notice that the party you're talking to is starting to sound very distant. Did they drop their phone? Are you in an area that's too noisy? No! The speaker hole just isn't lined up with your ear! The iPhone is the only cellphone I've used so far where I've had this problem. There's just so much non-speaker area on the fairly wide surface that the chances of it happening are much higher than on all my previous phones. (All Nokias, in case you were wondering.) And not only is it surrounded to the left and right by dead space, but the speaker hole itself is a tiny slit; further still making it a hard target to aim for. Simple back and forth jiggling may not fix it. You might have to go up and down too.

So, that's it for my iPhone rant.


3/20/2010

Sometimes I wish that it wasn't so easy to get addicted to blogs such as Failbooking, Clientcopia or Photoshop Disasters. Sometimes they're funny, but so often, they're not. And even when they're not, I still trudge through (even reading the comments).

I do appreciate sites like Not Always Right, because they moderate their posts. It doesn't take ages to catch up if you've been away for a while.


3/19/2010

Yes. I know. It's been a while since I've posted. Once again, I'll try to do better.

So, what opinion am I expressing now? Well… I finally watched the new SyFy channel and I no longer think of it as "Siffy". I heard it spoken too many times and the new name has finally settled in with me.