Monthly Archives: June 2003

Friday, 27 June 2003

Neato

Got my phone delivered to me yesterday less than 24 hours after the call from the phone company. Wow. They really seem to care about their customers. Too much competition I presume.

Most of the day was of course spent playing with my new phone. It’s pretty cool. I like the color display. Although it suffers from the GBA phenomenon: When the backlight is off it is hard to see stuff on the screen. But with backlight it’s sweeeet. Looks very crisp. The included games are not great. One is a not very fun jump ‘n run game where your “character” is a ball. The other one is a quite interesting chess puzzle with problems like “check mate in 1 turn”, “..in 2 turns” or “prevent check mate in 1 turn”. There must be better java games than those though. I’ll do some research and see what I find. Recommendations are of course welcome.

The other thing are the polyphonic ringing tones. I was perfectly okay with the monophonic ringing tones (or should I say beeps) my old phone had. As I said before I prefer unobtrusive rings. My old phone just rang in short single beeps. I never understood people who let their phones play some Bach requiem whenever it rings. Of course usually this is the same kind of people who sit next to you in the subway and need 5 minutes to find their blaring (at top volume of course) phone. The new phone has lots of these ringing tones too. The only one I found that was bearable is called “Croak”. And yes that is exactly what it sounds like. It is okay but I’ll still search the web for a better one. Or maybe I’ll just program my own. I do like the new sms tone though. It’s like the old one (beepbeep—-beepbeep) only in polyphonic and kind of cute.

I also need to personalize my phone. You can set background images and different color schemes. When I turned the phone on for the first time I almost dropped it because it had (my friend B will love this) the PINK color scheme (it’s my phone company’s color) and a background image that rendered the whole display completely unreadable. Of course that was the first things I changed. Unfortunately the other pictures it came with aren’t all that great either. But you can just upload your own pics (it can do jpgs and gifs). So I’ll draw my own.

  Posted by Edda at 01:31 CET  |    4 comments

Wednesday, 25 June 2003

Current Projects

I haven't been all lazy during the past weeks. Mikey and I are working on a couple of projects while we're waiting to get a job.

We are coding a webgame. It's a java puzzle game that we hope will turn out to be a fun little game. You will be able to blow things up and splatter paint everywhere. Now if that doesn't sound promising :)

The other thing we're doing is creating a website for a community project we intend to start. It will be a site where people can post articles about all kinds of geek wisdom, i. e. computer/technology related topics. For example Mikey intends to write an article about converting your CD collection into MP3s (i.e. which tools to use, how to encode the files, etc.). We also thought about articles about digital photography, problems you have to deal with as a webdesigner (e.g. making your site work with all browsers) or how to code a java webgame :) I've also been asked many times how I used MovableType to make my photo gallery so I will write about that. I'll also explain how the playlist in the sidebar works and post the script for it.

We got the idea for the site when we talked about how we really should write down solutions to computer related problems we had. There are some things that I keep looking up because I don't use them often enough to remember them the next time I need them. Also people would ask us how we do certain things (like how we rip our CDs). And then we thought there must be more people out there who want to know these things. We had to do a lot of research on the web to learn all the facts. But wouldn't it be cool if there was a single place where you can find all kinds of hints and references for further reading to certain topics?

So now we want to start this site and will send a "call for papers" to all our friends in hopes they have something to contribute as well. We hope this will grow into this big thing where everybody can write about anything they want other people to know, be it tips on how to custom-build your own computer, or hints about how to earn money fast in EverQuest. Anything goes.

  Posted by Edda at 01:35 CET  |    5 comments

Tuesday, 24 June 2003

New Phone

I got a call from my cell phone provider today that my two-year contract is about to expire and would I be interested in staying with them another two years? In case I wanted to stay another two years they offered me a new phone for cheap. Of course I was interested but I pretended to be a little reluctant because I needed more time to think about the phone I wanted.

I wasn't prepared for this because I thought my contract was good until later this year. So I asked the guy which phone he would recommend and then proceeded to ask hard to answer questions about the phone and other possible choices of phones so I could do some research on the web in the meantime.

It was quite funny actually. I had found the phone specs online after about 5 seconds so I asked him questions about stuff I had on my monitor to win some time. It was obvious that he really wanted me to buy the Nokia 6610 so I tried to find a couple of reviews. I don't expect people who want to sell me stuff over the phone to be honest but it looks like everything he told me was right and the phone has a very good value. Especially since I only have to pay half the price because I accepted the offer right away.

So my new phone will arrive here in two days or so. It has most of the features a modern phone needs, like color display, Java enabled, polyphonic ringing tones (although I'm not sure I'm happy about this as I prefer less obtrusive ringing tones), GPRS, WAP and a whole bunch of other features. It even has an integrated FM radio (I doubt I'll use that very often though) and already comes with a headset. It is also Tri-Band which is really nice. Not that I plan on using it outside of Germany very often but that might come in handy from time to time...

So now I'm looking forward to this new gadget to play with. Even more so since it was so cheap :)

  Posted by Edda at 23:14 CET  |    4 comments

Thursday, 19 June 2003

Better

I'm still not exactly happy but I'm feeling better now. A bunch of people wrote or called in to make me feel better and it helped. Thank you people (you know who you are)!

In other news: I bit my tongue today while chewing on a slice of pizza. Goddamn it hurt. It even bled a little. This was the most exciting piece of news I could come up with today. So there.

  Posted by Edda at 20:00 CET  |    0 comments

Monday, 16 June 2003

Sigh

As you can see from my very rare posts recently nothing is going on. I'm still looking for a job (of which there are currently not that many). I'm also depressed for some reason. It's not just that I don't find a job. I don't know. I'm just at a point in my life where I have to decide what I want my future to be like. I can't really tell why I'm so down lately but it sucks.

Bleagh. I better stop talking now. All that self pity is really unbearable. Edda out.

  Posted by Edda at 19:14 CET  |    5 comments

Saturday, 7 June 2003

Hero

We saw Hero yesterday. I just love Asian movies. They always have a special mood. I loved the colours in this one. I especially liked the translucent green cloth widths hanging from the ceiling and moving in the wind. That was just beautiful. I liked how the colours changed every time the same story was told again with a new twist. The colour would always depict the mood of the scene. Masterfully done.

  Posted by Edda at 20:56 CET  |    0 comments

Monday, 2 June 2003

Gaming Around the Clock

From Wednesday to Sunday we’ve been in Alsace, France for boardgaming weekend with our game club. It was great. The weather was so good that we spent most of the day gaming outside. Most people were not prepared for such good weather so many got a sunburn. This time we managed to play a lot of long games like Advanced Civilization, History of the World, 18xx, Die Macher and such. We also played some of the newer games from the Nürnberg fair, namely Amun Re, the new Knizia which is probably his best game since Euphrat & Tigris. I liked it a lot. There are quite a few interesting strategical decisions to be made. We also played Eiszeit, the new Alea game, which isn’t nearly as good as Puerto Rico and also much less complex, but it’s still nice to play from time to time. We played a ton more games which I cannot seem to remember at the moment. I just wish those gaming weekends were longer. Well I guess I’ll have not other choice than to wait for the next one in November…

  Posted by Edda at 20:40 CET  |    0 comments