cdixon posterous
formerly cdixon.posterous.com
Monthly Archives: July 2011
recent media consumption
Caanoo is definitely the best hand-held device ever made for playing retro arcade games. NES, Mame, and Amiga emulators all run great. Problem is that every time I play retro games they aren’t as fun as I remembered. Perhaps a failure to manufacture nostalgia? Although I will say NES version of Punch Out is still fun, as is Mame Sinistar.
As a user, I continue to love Twitter and just simply fail to understand the value of Facebook. Facebook is sometimes fun for going back to look back at old friends but otherwise just feels like a bunch of spammy disconnected tweets. Obviously i’m missing something since the rest of the world loves the damn thing. Best iPad games: Words with Friends (you knew that), 7 Little Words (you might not have known that), Helsing’s Fire (you didn’t know that… really, if you are going to play one iPad puzzle game this is it). Toss in Juice Belts and Sopilskier if you have time. Incredible Machine == Incredible Disappointment (bring back the old version!!). Ticket to Ride – I want to love you but why can’t you support asynchronous games with my friends a la Carcassonne and Words with Friends?? I really like the New Yorker iPad app. The only problem is you have to manually download issues, but it sounds like this will be fixed in iOS 5. NYTimes iPad app has gotten better but still miss the feel of the physical paper. I was subscribing to The Economist on my iPad but after that stupid tech bubble article have just found it intolerably stupid and need a few weeks cooling off to go back to it. Nintendo 3DS: Want to love it. Blown away by screen technology. In the end, the 3DS – like life – just gives me a headache. Wow, Nintendo has gone from brilliant back when they launched the Wii to kind of irrelevant now.Books: Reading The Lean Startup (great, even though I’ve already read almost all of Eric’s blog posts), Tempo (@ribbonfarm is a super smart guy), Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo – a bit precious but still interesting. My favorite DeLillo books are White Noise and End Zone.
At the risk of being accused of talking my book, I’ve been basing all these choices on Hunch. It is working better every day. Right now you have to rate a bunch of stuff to get it working really well. The onboarding will be fixed soon to make this smoother.
Finally: Python, I love you but ” “.join(“a b c”) syntax is bringing me down. And: Node.js – we all love event-driven web servers (e.g. Tornado) but the idea that using Javascript on the backend will somehow unite front-end and back-end programmers overestimates the similarity between the two jobs and the importance of language syntax.
