teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

So, I just played a demo of the latest Need For Speed Undercover…. and it is seriously as bad as the last version of the game. It’s the same high speed, shinny roads, with the sun in your eyes crap that it seems Need for Speed is opting for now.

I will admit right now… that I’ve played every single need for speed from the beginning From back when 3D racing was brand new until now. And I might even say that it is a tie between Underground 2 and Porsche Unleashed for my favorites. I’ve been a fan of the entire series and beaten every single one.  At least until Pro Street. I played the Pro Street demo and it was so bad, that I did not even get the full game. And that was a huge disappointment to me. And now that Undercover is equally as bad, I’m really disappointed in EA.

I hope the next one is better so we can move on and just forget about these 2 bumps in the Need For Speed history.

So… consider this my official review on Need For Speed Undercover: It sucks… hardcore.

Upfront, let me say that I am pleased with my decision to get this phone. Also, let me say that after my initial reaction, I was quite critical of the phone overall. So since I recommend it in the end, I can honestly say that it is not nearly as bad as many reviews say.

It takes some getting used to, but once you are used to it, there is no major problem with it. Remember that a lot of reviewers only spend a few days with the phone and that a lot of users may have been turned off by it after seeing it in the store (like I was initially).

I will break this down into sections. If you’d like me to comment more in a particular section or add yet another section, please let me know.

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So… let me just start off by saying I was extremely excited about this phone ever since I heard about it. The only thing I was unsure about before I clicked order was the touch screen typing deal. So that is what I went into the Verizon Store to check out… other than that…. I was completely sold. And I was perfectly willing to say forget it if I thought the typing interface was bad.

Well… I soon found out there was more I should look at.

Holy shit this phone really sucked.

I was at the Verizon Store for a good 45 minutes checking out the Storm… and other phones. I bounced between other Blackberries and smartphones… just to confirm that smart phones aren’t as bad as the Blackberry Storm.

Again… I was very excited for this phone… and I was quickly turned off upon finally playing with it.

The typing was actually not too bad. It wasn’t perfect… but neither was my typing on the Curve. So I attribute that to the fact that I’ve simply never owned a smart phone. It did feel limiting in terms of speed, so… take that review with a grain of salt.

I continued to play around with it… and I quickly concluded that the interface sucks. The lag on this device was so bad… I wasn’t sure if I had clicked what I wanted to click, clicked the wrong thing, or if the phone had simply crashed. A good 5 seconds later… you get your answer… which was often that you had clicked the wrong thing. That really kills the experience with this phone.

Since I had never owned a Blackberry and never really used one, I went and played with the Curve and the World Edition Blackberries. The interfaces on those phones was just fine.

So… take this mini-review as an initial reaction to the phone… I will try to go back at some point and see if a second chance will make up for it. But for now… I don’t want this phone anymore.

I used to just use webmail for my main e-mail account (gmail) and my school e-mail. I’ve always used Outlook on my desktop for my ISPs e-mail because it’s not important and I rarely check it. But a few months ago I was chatting with someone and they made a compelling argument that made me want to try actually using a software client for e-mail. Just because it was there, I decided I’d give Apple Mail a go. It was a little rough starting… trying to get used to things on it and what not. But I gave it an honest chance and in the end I find I actually pretty much like it.

Recently my brother was telling me he used it and found that it sucked with his g-mail account because he had so much e-mail. I’m not sure why that would matter other than they initial sync. He probably didn’t give it enough of a chance. (We’re both using IMAP, btw.) He said he uses thunderbird and finds it to be much better. I had always heard about thunderbird but have never actually tried it, despite loving Firefox (which oddly enough my brother hates… he’s retarded in that sense).

So… last night I gave Thunderbird a go. I setup IMAP for my gmail and closed Apple Mail to give Thunderbird a good chance. Just over 24 hours later… I had closed Thunderbird and reopened Apple Mail because I can’t stand Thunderbird.

From the start, it just felt like crap. It has a very boring theme and it just feels like a hack off a web browser or something (which it is). Every time you click a folder it has to load up the messages… then eventually loads and scrolls to the most recently selected message. Such an operation is instant in Apple Mail. There was also a weird issue where some random message was just brought to the front of the list as if I had just received it… but it was from sometime in 2007. I tried reordering by date (again)… but it still insisted that I had just received this message.

Then after some time… I realized that you have to actually click on the various folders (labels in g-mail terms) to see if there are new messages in them. That is stupid and I couldn’t find any way to fix it. I decided to look for an Add-On. While I was looking through them… I found an Apple Mail theme and decided to try it out just because I thought the default theme sucked. I go to install it and it says it’s not compatible with my version of thunderbird (the latest, 2.0.0.14). I dismiss it as just that maintainer not keeping it up to date. I then found an add-on that might help with this new messages in different folders issue. I go to install that and lo-and-behold… it isn’t compatible either! Two add-ons in a row… both of which would actually improve my experience with Thunderbird. Why the hell are so many add-ons incompatible with the latest version of the software?!

Also… some general things like a stupid question every time I go to send an e-mail about using plain text, html, or both was really getting on my nerves. I just want to send the fucking message as it is… if it has HTML in it then that is what I wanted. Just send the damn message! It was also very slow at actually downloading a message when I click on it to read it.

I did a Google search on this just to see if I was alone in my thinking… and it’s evident that I’m not.

So… I recommend that you don’t use Thunderbird. Use Apple Mail (if possible), Outlook, or just webmail. (Honestly… Outlook is a pretty good mail client (Not Outlook Express)).

Dear Firefox,

I am amazed at how bad you’ve made Firefox 3. Seriously… what the hell? I’ve been using all betas of it, and each beta release seems to get worse than the one before it. The latest beta 5 does not even render some pages anywhere near correctly…. more pages than beta 4 had trouble with. I know it’s beta, and I hope the issues get resolved, but that is not my only dissatisfaction with this version of Firefox:

Download Manager… what the hell? You got rid of all buttons in it. Why?! I don’t use the stupid download manager for anything more than downloading. I get the impression that you want me to use it to manage all past downloads, with the search and all… I don’t want to do that! And with the lack of all buttons on it, I have to now right click it and select “Clear List.” That is an extra click that I don’t like!

Home… what the hell? What happened to the Home button. Actually… it goes beyond that, even. I have a keyboard that I love and that I have grown accustomed to using the hot keys on. The most used hotkey has been “My Home” which used to open up a new browser window. But now you take my current window and send me to my home page. Why!? That is NOT what I want and I can’t find an option to change the behavior of this.

Are you simply getting nervous of the new IE 8 sporting it’s all better view on life?

I wont say it’s all bad… it does seem to render pages faster.

Please consider not sucking for the final release, or I may just have to find myself a new browser…. and don’t make me use IE, please. But I don’t want to give you false fear of me going to Safari, though. I won’t do that, don’t worry.

Sincerely,
Todd

This will be my first hardware review!

As many of you know, I opted for the one, the only Apple MacBook Pro 15.4″ Matte 2.4Ghz. Some people that know me were surprised, and obviously questioned why. I’ll tell you why. I love it. I’m not going to lie, I just plain love it. Since I first saw it in 2006, I have wanted it so bad. In fact, for the last several years, since Apple started making more professional looking machines (bright colors and bubbly designs are OK for kids, not for professionals), I have loved the designs. But then, seeing them take the latest G4 laptop and making it even thinner and sexier, and significantly more powerful with an Intel chip, I have wanted nothing more.

Let me first start with the cost. I got a student discount of a whopping $200, but even then, that only covered the tax plus a little more. So, it ended up being nearly $2500, still. That is a lot of money, I understand, but I can tell you right now, it was worth it. Many of my friends opted for the dells, but they ended up having to go with the 17″ versions to match the chip in my 15.4 laptop. Going to the 17″, from what I’ve seen, makes it simply to big to carry around. One of those 17″ dell will not even fit in my backpack laptop compartment. I did not want a 17″ laptop, but I didn’t want any smaller than a 15.4″.

Now, lets review all its sexy lines. This thing is 1 inch thin. In that 1 inch, it fits a powerful 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM (which I will be upgrading to 4GB soon), an 8600GT 256MB, 160GB HD, 8X DVD Burner, and a whole lot more! This machine packs so much power into such a small, sexy package that you can’t help but to drool when you see it. It never slows down for me. I love the fact that is holds more power than my big desktop (currently). It maintains pretty good battery life; nearly 4 hours, depending on what I’m doing. The hardware amazes me every time.

One feature that is something that I know for a fact that Windows never pulls off consistently, if at all, is when I close the lid, the machine goes to sleep, and it stays asleep. I have never seen a windows computer do that every single time, and resume without issues, or stay off, for that matter. There is nothing that can stop my MacBook Pro from sleeping and staying asleep with everything I’m working on intact.

Now, the OS. I’m not going to say that Mac OS X is flawless, that is a common misconception. No OS is flawless, I don’t care what you say. I’ll tell you right now, Tiger has serious networking issues, but remember, Windows does, too. Connecting to networks is no problem, it just simply isn’t very friendly with windows systems, and when you go to a different network, such as school, it seems to get very confused about those shares (kind of yells “Where the fuck did it go!? What do I do?!”). But, overall, the OS is amazing. Why do I love it? Because it is fluent to me. It is unix based, and I can’t even explain to the average computer user how much I love having access to a unix terminal at any time. Also, the OS does hold more of a “It Just Works” type of rational than Windows does. When I plug in a flash drive, it just pops up in Finder. There is no stupid “Found New Hardware, Please wait while we figure this mess out.” It Just Works. Same thing with a mouse, camera, scanner, whatever.

Also, the OS does just have a certain theory about it that just says it was built for efficiency. The keyboard shortcuts are much better laid out in OS X than in Windows. I truly feel like I can get more done on it in less time. In addition, the GUI is designed in such a way that a novice user can use it easily, but also an advanced user, like myself, can customize it a lot.

So, you are a person that thinks I spent too much for this sexy machine. Well, I did do some shopping around. First of all, to even get this amount of power in a dell, you need to go to the small to medium sized business website, because their consumer line does not even over up to the 2.4Ghz chip. Then, to build a comparable machine, it will cost approximately the same, even today. And, it will still not be as sexy, it will still have a glossy screen (glossy screens are terrible), and it will also lack the wonderful Mac OS X.

But I can’t game much on here? Not true, again. Boot Camp, as you probably know, allows me to install Vista or XP on here, making it possible to be just as game friendly as any Windows laptop. Then, Apple is starting to collect game manufactures who are willing to write games for Mac OS X as well as windows. So, I really think Apples could be a future gaming competitor, which can actually be more easily achieved because Apple controls all their hardware, so incompatibilities will be very limited.

I am at this point patiently awaiting Mac OS X Leopard. I will most likely review that after I’ve been using it for some time.

So, in the end… MacBook Pro – Love it. Recommend it. 10/10, 5/5, whatever scale you want to use. Don’t need so much power, or don’t have so much money to spend? I’d probably recommend something else. Just ask, and I’d be glad to make recommendations!