Archive for the 'Featured Posts' Category

Lesson Earned

Published on January 3, 2012 in Featured Posts and Life. 2 Comments

I don’t like Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly a Scrooge. I LOVE the holiday! But there’s always something that bothers me about receiving gifts. (By this logic, I also dislike my birthday, something everyone around me can attest is entirely false.)

Here’s the deal: receiving gifts–or payments, or praises for that matter–bothers me when I don’t feel like I’ve earned them. In fact, it makes me feel pretty terrible. Humbled, but terrible.

Backstory

December, I bought three copies of Batman: Arkham City Collector’s Edition from Best Buy for $35 each. With tax, the total came out to around $112. The intent, of course, was to sell them and make a very quick profit, since these were retailing for $75 in places like the Amazon Marketplace and eBay, and for $99 (plus tax) at most other stores. (I would have bought more, but there was a three-per-order limit, and by my second pass–six minutes after the sale started–they were sold out.) If I made enough, however, I’d keep one for myself.

This all could be yours if the price is... sufficient?

My original thought was to do a quick turn-around: post them for sale so that when they arrived they would already be sold: immediate profit. Being that this was my first time doing this, I decided against that. After all, I didn’t know exactly what condition things would be in when I got them. In theory they would be new. In theory. So I waited. In practice.

Arrival of the Fittest

Once they arrived I kicked myself: they were perfect! I could have sold them right there and then! I looked online to see how these should be priced and… OK, it looks as if a glut hit the market because the cheapest price was now $57.

Still, I wanted to learn about the business of reselling, so with a friend’s help, I went to sell them on Amazon. Because this was the first time I did this, I followed his advice regarding pricing: “To move it fast, place it $1 below the lowest price.”

I didn’t like this. Not one bit. I wouldn’t earn my copy: I’d either have to sell higher, “pay” a little for my copy (under $10, so still not bad), or I’d just have to sell all three of them. This had me pretty bummed out. At least I’d earn a profit, right? Sure, I’d have to pay Amazon their due (around $10), but then they would give me $4 for shipping, so in the end I’d get back… $50. Which meant a $12.50 profit once things were said and done. (With tax each unit was around $37.50.) Of course, then I’d have to pay for shipping, which according to the USPS website would be around $6. Can you see the problem here? Spend $37.50, earn $44. This would be great if I had a hundred of these instead of just three.

I did it anyway. Four hours later the game had sold…to some lady in North Dakota. Merry Christmas, lady.

Surprise, or Overprise?

The next day I went to the post office to deliver the package. Remember that estimate of $6? Yeah, that was off by about $5. It was $10.75 for shipping. So… $38.25 total for the unit.

A $1.50 profit.

Yay, learning.

Yay.

Sigh.

Another Approach

I didn’t want to just let these things go for the same price as I got them–that would be of no use to me, since I still wanted to, at the very least, make a profit. So instead of putting the next one back on Amazon, I decided to wait and look for other opportunities, hoping that the market influx would dry up some and the price would rise a bit. (It has, but not by much. Lowest price is still in the low $60′s. My guess is that it’ll stay that way.) Rolling the dice, I decided to put the piece up on Craig’s List for $70. This would net me a $32.50 profit, just about enough to cover the cost of the other unit at a very minor loss to me.

A few days before Christmas it sold, though the guy talked me down to $65.

The Lesson

This wasn’t enough, though, not to me. $27.50+$1.50 = $29. The unit was $37.50, so I’d still be $8.50 short. I wanted to EARN the thing, not pay for it. My wife said to keep it as a Christmas gift to myself, a cheap one. But I couldn’t. I mean, I thought about it, tried to justify it, but I couldn’t bring myself to keeping it. It would feel wrong, like I was violating some sort of cosmic rule.

This was when I learned my lesson. For years, I couldn’t figure out WHY I felt so guilty getting gifts, and why I always preferred buying things for myself. It’s not that I’m a control freak (though sometimes I can be that), it’s that receiving gifts like this feels like charity. While I’m not above receiving charity, I’m certainly not interested in encouraging it.

In this case this would be not just charity to myself, it would also be the worst form of materialism. I vowed to earn a profit. I hadn’t. To keep this would be to spend money I didn’t have, money that could go to pay a bill or give to someone who needs it more than me.

On the bright side, it would mean less crap in my house, right?

Aw Crap! It’s a Miracle!

Then, a Christmas miracle. Someone sent me a copy of another game, Battlefield 3. I’m not really into this type of game, so I told them they should keep it, that if I kept it, I’d likely sell it. “Consider it then a Christmas cash present.” And that’s what I did.

There's a reason we're the good guys.

The game sold for $50, netting me $40 in total profit.

I’d just earned my game. And my lesson.

Retrospect

When we’re kids, being good IS the work. Going to school IS the work. And that’s how we earned our payments, our praises, and our Christmas gifts. (“He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”) As an adult there’s really no such restriction, at least I don’t feel any. In this case, receiving gifts, particularly at a time like this, becomes empty, mechanical, expected, and ultimately damaging to the self esteem. For the past few years–2011 included–I’d gotten around the empty feeling by shopping for deals for people, helping them save money, or by giving money and gifts to charities. I guess I felt that by doing that I could earn whatever I received, at least part of it. (I’m still terribly humbled at a life I can only call blessed.)

To be frank, when it comes to Christmas, I really would prefer just to give to people: I get a far greater joy when I do that. But other people like to give–and I actually do like receiving, under the right circumstances–so I don’t want to take that away from them. However, now that I understand myself a bit better…maybe I’ll be a better recipient. At the very least, I know this lesson has made me into a better person.

Final Fantasy XIII Review

Published on May 24, 2011 in Featured Posts and Technology. 2 Comments Tags: jrpg, PS3, video games, XBox360.

After spending 75 hours on a game I might as well tell you my thoughts on it, so here’s a very quick review of Final Fantasy XIII.

Synopsis

If you’re not at all interested in the nuances, just know that I gave the game a 7 out of 10: stunning graphics, great voice acting, good music, but pacing killed the story and gameplay. A good way to think about this game is to think of it like Lord of the Rings: very slow in some areas, but very rewarding when it finally begins to explain what’s going on. If you can trudge along for a while until the party all finally re-unites half way through the game, and if you’ve liked the Final Fantasy series then this is one I recommend. Also, if you like visually stunning games, this one’s for you. Heck, as of this writing it’s selling for about $25 on Amazon, so go grab it. Now. But, if you’re more interested in very detailed, brain intensive gameplay look elsewhere.

The Review

The story in this game is the standard FF affair: a small band of people made extraordinary by some event or choice have to save the world. There are two societies that hate each other, and through the game you visit both, you discover that things aren’t what they seem, and in the end you fight something that wants to destroy everyone for the sake of some grand, delusional goal.

The characters have the potential to be interesting, but really aren’t.

The main character is Lightning, a soldier with the body of a model and the personality of a rock.
Lightning has a sister (Sera) who’s getting married to Snow, who’s… this guy, you know? He’s pretty good with his fists and leads a band of lazy jackasses named NORA. Lightning dislikes him. She dislikes everything, but mostly him.
Speaking of disliking Snow, there’s Hope, a kid who watches his mother, Nora, die after Snow fails to pull her from a falling bridge. He blames Snow for some reason and has this weird Anakin/Padome relationship with Lightning.
Then there’s Sazh. He’s “the black guy”. He’s got a fro with a bird living inside it. A chocobo. In his hair. As in “permanent residence.” He also has a kid, Dodge, who also has a fro, though his is fowl-free. A grand total of two black guys in the game, one named after a car, and they both have fros. Also, they’re magical. No, seriously, they are.
Then there’s Vanille, the happy-go-lucky love-a-bunch who’s 16 and also hundreds of years old. For some reason she’s also the narrator for part of the game. This whole narration thing goes nowhere. I wish it would have, because I love narrated stories.
She has a friend, Fang, who wears this awesome sari along with a not-at-all awesome mullet. Fang and Vanille are from New Zealand, I think.

From left to right: Snow, Vanille, Fang, Lightning, Sazh, Hope, Snow’s financee/Ligtning’s sister.So those are your characters. They all have some type of development go on, but it’s not particularly dramatic in most cases. With a little tweaking to the way the story was presented, these guys could have been incredible. Instead they were just… you know, kind of cool, but not really all that interesting. Maybe if I play it again…

Speaking of playing again, gameplay is also standard: you run around and fight enemies. The battle system really allows for fluid battle scenes, so it’s great for eye candy, especially when Lightning gets a cool ability like Army of One. Not so great for when you want to control every aspect of every character, because you can’t. You choose a party leader and that’s the only person you can control. This was problematic in some ways–only the person you control ever uses their special ability or related summon, for example–but it also made it fun in others, since it kept things moving. (Two words: Eye candy.)

The biggest overall flaw in this game had to do with the pacing. It was a complex story with a lot of threads from the start. That isn’t a problem, in fact it’s a good thing, but the character development happens so slowly that you really don’t get a chance to WANT to start caring about the characters. I didn’t care about the characters until I was already almost 35 hours into the game. This is due to the fact that character development happens exclusively in cut scenes as opposed to conversations you initiate, which is the case with other FF games. Also, the fact that you don’t really get to explore until Chapter 11 (which is about 35 hours into the game) means that the vast majority of the game is comprised of a long hallway with an orange spot at the end of it indicating either an enemy or a cut scene, thereby giving rise to the nickname “Hallways and Cut Scenes: The Game.”

Still, if you’re a fan of FF games it’s worth a try, if for no other reason than to enjoy the beautiful graphics. The fact that you can play the vast majority of the game with one finger (just keep pressing X, you’ll be fine) is debatable as a weakness. Personally, I rather enjoyed being able to watch shows on my computer while “playing” the game, especially in parts where I was mostly farming for money or points.

The Score Breakdown

Story and Character Development: 2 out of 10.7 out of 10 if we ignore the pacing (which we won’t, seeing as it’s such a HUGE flaw). As for the story itself, unless you pay close attention to the clues in the story the ending will have you thinking “What the heck just happened?” Still, it’s not bad. But pacing… yes, the pacing is THAT bad, and it causes problems through the entire game. I lay it squarely (no pun intended) on the shoulders of character development happening exclusively in cut scenes rather than in player-initiated conversations. Also there weren’t really any enemies you could point your finger at and say “That’s an enemy,” at least not any memorable ones. A lot of characters were introduced, but they simply weren’t developed. Oh sure, you had that one Fal’Cie guy who kept showing up, but the only thing that made any other baddie distinguishable from random background characters was the (forgettable) reappearances. Above: Forgettable characterBelow: Slightly less forgettable character
The pacing was so bad that 30 hours into it I almost dropped the game. I simply didn’t care about the cardboard characters or the convoluted story. After plowing through and finishing the game anyway, I’m pretty glad I didn’t drop it.
Gameplay: 6 out of 10, and it’s mostly due to a huge issue with the party set-up. The fighting system itself is pretty good, and you can choose how involved you want it to be: do you want to choose every move or do you want to let the computer decide the best course of action?The problem is that in this game you only control one character at a time, which is on its face not all that bad since it makes for more fluid battles, until you realize that you can revive every other character in your party, but if your main character dies, no one can revive you. Game over. This pissed me off to no end: why in the heck can’t my healer heal me? And why can’t someone use a Phoenix Down?! I have like 30 of them!Edit:I forgot to mention stores, money, and points. Unlike in other FF games, FFXIII does away with the concept of gil-for-kill. (The point system, however, is alive and well.) Instead, all the animals drop something which can be used to either upgrade weapons or sell in the games stores. If you use it to upgrade weapons then the weapons get experience points. There’s no secondary development which makes the weapon gain intrinsic powers based on what you use to upgrade it. It’s just points. If you sell the item then you can get enough money to buy some worthwhile and hard-to-get items which can speed up the weapon upgrade process.Regarding stores, these are only available in save spots. They’re not shops in the map, but rather more like websites. This makes the shopping experience a predictable and somewhat boring experience, but it takes the annoyance of having missed a shop (and therefore an awesome item you can never again gain access to) out of the equation. I actually rather liked this change.
Finally, there are upgrade paths. Like Final Fantasy X and XII, upgrades are done by using points buy level upgrades: more HP, different powers, higher strength, higher magic. Unlike these previous versions, however, and in keeping with the rest of this games linear proclivities, the upgrade paths are very… well, linear. There are different roles you can upgrade, but each role’s upgrade path is fairly linear. I guess this goes along well with the role-based fighting system they introduced, which is similar to the outfit system in Final Fantasy X-2: so long as you’re playing this particular role you can’t do things in other roles. So your guy is a Sentinel? Then he can’t cast cure. I’ve never really liked that system, although it makes sense, and does give the game an element of strategy.
Graphics: 10 out of 10. Yes, they were that stunning. I’m tempted to give it an 11, or even a 12! The bonus points for being the only thing at times that kept me playing. The game is GORGEOUS. Here’s a beautiful example of what I mean. This is at the beginning of Chapter 12. Fast forward to 7:45 for a great scene.
Music: 8 out of 10. Not memorable, but certainly not bad. It fulfilled the most important role of theatrical scores: ambiance without getting in the way. During fights, I rarely noticed the music. This is a good thing. I only really noticed it when it was fitting within the story. This, again, is a good thing.
Value: 9 out of 10. One cool feature for those of us who get all obsessive about completing every single thing and getting the absolute most out of the game is that you can go back to the game after you finish it and complete all the side quests you may have missed. (You get a chance to save your progress after the credits.) That’s a nice little bit of extra value, and just about the only real exploration you get to do in the game. The keyword here is “value”. I wish more RPGs did this. Heck, I wish I got to do this with Final Fantasy X (probably my favorite in the series). I really liked Blitzball! The 9 out of 10 is taking into consideration the after-game playability, which can go on for as long as you’d like. In fact, the game took me about 75hrs to finish, and I can see myself playing for at least another 30 if I decided to undertake all the sidequests and the upgrade paths. The only knock is that you have to trudge through the game for too long before you finally get to the fun part.

So taking all these scores into consideration: 5 categories for 50 points total. The game gets 35 points. That’s a solid 70% or 7 out of 10. (3.5 stars out of 5 is more Amazonian.)

In the end, here’s the important question: was it a fun game? Yes. Would I play it again? Maybe, if for no other reason than to watch all the cinematics. That’s one thing I loved about Final Fantasy X: you could re-watch the story’s cinematics in the Luca theater. FFXIII deserved at least as much.

And if you’re wondering, yes, I’ll pick up the sequel, Final Fantasy XIII-2. Don’t know about Final Fantasy Versus XIII, but we’ll see. Hope you enjoyed this review.

Wait, You Finished the Game. How About a Walkthrough?

This isn’t a walkthrough. This is a review. If you’re looking for walkthroughs you can buy the official guide–there’s even a collector’s edition–or you can use a search engine. However, if you want a pretty great set of video walkthroughs check out Hassan AlHajry’s channel on YouTube. In fact, if you don’t want to play the game, but want to enjoy the cut-scenes and know the story you can just watch this.

While I’m usually a fan of walkthroughs (I’m the type that buys the book and tries to do everything perfectly), I found that this game lacked so much exploration throughout most of it that one wasn’t really needed until Chapter 11, when you get to Gran Pulse. (Unless, of course, you want to get top ratings on every fight, which helps out when it comes to dropped items and trophies.) After that, yeah, you may want a walkthrough. What you will definitely want, though, is a gil farming guide since there really isn’t any gil to be gained by killing monsters, only by selling stuff they drop and things you find while riding around on a chocobo.

iPhone 4 vs. Android: Observations

Published on February 19, 2011 in Apple and Featured Posts. 10 Comments

OK, so here’s the deal: a while back, I wrote a non-review on the Motorola Droid. Since that time, the Droid died after allegedly getting into a fight with a washing machine. I was able to get a Droid X to replace it, and while I was going to write a non-review of that one, too, timing struck like lightning, and a miracle occurred: the Verizon iPhone 4 announcement. As luck would have it, I would have an opportunity to trade in my Droid X for an iPhone.

Out of curiosity, I took the plunge.

If you read my Twitter stream over the past few weeks, you’d think I hate the iPhone. While it’s true that there are a lot of things I don’t like, there are actually a lot of things I really, really like. The following is a list of things I like and dislike about the iPhone, when compared to my previous experience with the Droid. If you want a quick synopsis, here it is: both are great. The iPhone has better apps, but Android has more functionality. Anyone asking me for a recommendation would get a long list of questions about needs before I’d make one.

Anyway, so here we go. Note that these aren’t listed in any particular order.

Annoyances

No way of modifying the snooze time on the alarm: I woke up this morning multiple times before I realized there was no way of doing this.
No home-screen widgets available: This is especially annoying when it comes to the included weather app, which includes an icon that says it’s 73-degrees outside. It’s annoying because once I thought that was actually the temperature (it’s FL, so 73-degrees in February isn’t exactly odd), so I dressed appropriately. Then I stepped out, and quickly turned around: it was actually 45-degrees. Brrr! A weather widget with the right temperature on the home screen would have prevented that, and would be rather useful. I want it.
Jailbreaking is a necessity: I see now why people feel the need to jailbreak their iPhones. By comparison, I never once felt the need to root my Droid. Ever. People jailbreak to use the phone to what is expected of a device this powerful (like a fraking widget). People root in order to gain access to low level functions that most users would never event think of wanting. That’s the difference.
Cost: The CDMA iPhone is $100 more than the GSM iPhone, and $100 more expensive than comparable Android or WP7 phones.
Safari: I hate it. It wastes screen space and it won’t reformat a page in such a way to make it readable on the phone. Sorry, but the retina display shouldn’t be used to help decrease font sizes. The Android web browser is far, far, far superior. Safari is the Internet Explorer (5 through 8, take your pick) of cell phones.
Speech-to-text: A feature I used all the time, speech-to-text was my savior during long drives when I needed to tweet something out, or when I wanted to call someone and couldn’t look at the screen, or when I just didn’t want to deal with a keyboard. In iOS, this is missing. Sure, I can download a Google app that would allow this type of search, but I’ve yet to find a free solution which allows me to turn speech into text for SMS messages.
Inability to tweet/Facebook pics directly when viewed: In Android, you can open a picture and immediately, while viewing it, upload it to Twitter or Facebook. Not the case in iOS, which allows you only to MMS or email the image. Want to tweet it? Go to your Twitter app, start a message, and from there select the image you want to tweet. Same with Facebook. So much for uploading on the fly. This makes putting pics up in social media sites a rather cumbersome process. (h/t to Kamigoroshi for pointing this out.)
(EDIT 3/14, Pi Day!) Using your own songs as ring tones is a chore: In Android it was easy to make a song into a ring tone. Long-press on the song and select “Make ring tone.” Of course, you could also go into the settings and do the same thing. On the iPhone you have two choices for doing this: you can either buy the ring tone for $.99 or make the ring tone yourself by following some needlessly convoluted procedure. Really, this is utter crap, and the kind of thing that will push me away from a platform, quickly. iOS may be generally more user friendly (and certainly more eye-pleasing) than Android, but Google’s mobile OS is certainly more consumer friendly than Apple’s.
(EDIT 3/14) The war against the long-press: This may just be a me-thing, but I expect that if I hold my finger to something long enough on the screen, a menu should pop up, if it makes sense for a menu to be there. Apple seems to have a hatred of this, so this kind of menu is not available anywhere, making for some rather unintuitive, ways to doing things, like leaving a screen and returning to another screen. A great example is adding songs to playlists: there is no easy way of doing it from the song itself, so you can’t just say, “Oh, this song is great for my ‘writing’ playlist, let me add it,” then click a button and have it added. You have to exit out of the song’s screen, go to the Playlist menu, select the play list, click Edit, click the Add button, find the song, then click the small Add button on the song. Talk about a mood killer.
(EDIT 3/14) Dropped calls: OK, so the “grip of death” doesn’t present on this version of the iPhone as it does on the AT&T version, but reception problems remain, and dropped calls are more frequent.
Full-screen pop-ups: Every time there is some sort of action or message, such as a text, a pop-up takes over the screen. I prefer Android’s method of just having a small info button on the task bar. Much more user friendly.

What I Miss

My huge, honkin’ screen: I had a Motorola Droid. After that I had a Motorola Droid X. Both had larger screens than the iPhone. In fact, the Droid X had a 4.3-inch screen, which made it a dream to watch movies, look at pictures, and play games. The iPhone has a 3.5-inch screen. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that, when looking at the thing, one feels like a cramped phone while the other feels like a small tablet. In fact, my Droid X had become my favorite web browsing method. That hasn’t quite carried to my iPhone.
If Verizon ever gets the Dell Streak I think I may have to grab it. A 5-inch screen? On a phone? It’s more likely than you think. And it looks SPECTACULAR. It also helps if you have big hands, so I realize this isn’t for everyone.

Because of this, I joked with my wife that if I got tired of the iPhone, I would grab her Droid and she could have the iPhone. Her words: “From my cold, dead hands.”
The Android web browser: I think it’s actually Chrome, but I’m not sure. In any case, I rather liked that browser. Of course, my preferred browser across my systems is Google’s Chrome. Safari, while having some nice options, feels cramped, with a lot of wasted space. Not much different than using IE, or stock Firefox. I’ll be looking for a new browser.
Moving backgrounds (Live Wallpaper): Minor issue here, but I rather liked being able to select live wallpapers as my background on my Android phones. Someone recently compared to glitter trailers on a pointer in a Geocities page. I contend it’s more like having an extra tool at your disposal, since live wallpapers can be programmed to do things like track the phases of the moon, or change according to the time of day (a rather attractive effect) or, in my case, remind me of the greatest movie of all time (The Matrix, of course).
Edit: I found a way to do live wallpaper, but it involves jailbreaking.
Free navigation software: I used Google’s navigation software all the time. Unfortunately, it’s not available on the iPhone. If I want a comparable navigation package, I have to pay, either $.99 plus a subscription fee for some services or $35 for something like Garmin.
No timestamps on texts: There are timestamps on calls. There are timestamps on emails. Why in the name of Woz is there not a timestamp on an SMS?! OK, so there are time stamps marking the beginning of conversations, which is useful, but given the format in which SMS’s are displayed in iOS, timestamps for each message could have been added. To be fair, I can see why they didn’t add them: if you’re looking for a specific conversation, then a timestamp for the conversation is far more useful than a timestamp for every item. Still, I would have liked them there.
(EDIT 3/14) Options in how you do things: Apple has always been known for simplicity, and over the past decade a very strong move has been made toward minimalism. While this is good in a lot of ways, it also means that they provide you exactly one way to do things, imposing a sort of “one way or the highway” feel to their products. Don’t like it? Well, too bad. (Unless, of course, you jailbreak, thereby voiding your warranty and any Apple support.) At least on Android you were usually given three or four ways of doing things. This makes it hard because interfaces aren’t as unified, but makes it better because you work like you feel most comfortable.

What I Like

Apps. Wait, let me say that again. APPS!: From what I’ve seen, pretty much the only reason to own an iPhone is to have access to its app market. Without its superiority in app availability, the iPhone becomes nothing but a piece of pretty, but ultimately boring and borderline annoying tech. Acquiring apps was the first thing I did when I got the phone. Also, with the improvements to the Android market, I’m not sure the Apple market really has that great advantage it once had. I can’t help but wonder how Palm (WebOS) and Microsoft (WP7) will stack up.
More visually appealing: This has always been one of the iPhone’s strongest suits. Too often, Android looks like Windows 3.1 reincarnate. iPhone apps, on the other hand, tend to look like someone sweat over the placement of every pixel. This has a lot to do with the framework upon which the app was built, and Apple’s framework is pretty tight, due to the simple fact that they only really need to support a very limited number of screen sizes.
Not everything is great with the framework, though: a lot of apps don’t go horizontal on iOS. On the other hand, I can’t remember an app on Android that DIDN’T do horizontal. This bespeaks of something within the framework itself, something I see as a flaw. If I’m wrong about this, someone please correct me.
Uninstalling apps: In Android, if you want to uninstall an app you have to go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications, then select the application and click the Delete button from the application’s information screen. In iOS you long-press on an icon, then click on the X that appears above the application to delete it. In Android I used to be afraid to add too many apps because I didn’t want to have to deal with the uninstallation process. In iOS it’s as easy as it gets.
Better touchscreen: The touchscreen sensitivity on the iPhone is better than any I’ve seen on Android. That’s because Apple holds a patent on the hardware-driven touchscreen, meaning Android screens can only be software-based. The problem with this is especially evident in the keyboard and in gaming, but really only when compared side-to-side. Most people wouldn’t, right off the bat, really notice in most cases.
Better software keyboard: My original Droid had a hardware keyboard. Eventually, this became stiff and useless, which is why I switched phones. On my Droid X, I had a software keyboard, something I wasn’t crazy about at first, but which I quickly got used to. Luckily, between then and now the stock Android keyboard improved dramatically. Eighteen months ago it was all but useless, which is why I demanded a hardware keyboard. Now it’s pretty good, if you have enough real estate for your fingers to do their thing. The iPhone’s keyboard, while smaller, has proven far more accurate than Android’s, due in large part to the better touch screen. What really gets me is that iOS auto-correct is also smarter.
On a side note, the Droid X had this weird bug where symbols would automatically be tacked to the end of a word. For example, instead of letting me type:

She said “Hi”. By the way, I’m putting in $10.

The phone would auto-correct to:

She said” Hi”. By the way, im putting in$ 10.

This was the single biggest annoyance about the Droid X for me. The keyboard was one of the main reasons I switched to the iPhone. To be fair, the inclusion of Swype on the Droid X was compelling enough that I almost stayed with that, instead.
Better call quality: Multiple times I’ve been told by people that my voice sounds a lot clearer now than it did before. Seems the iPhone provides better call quality than either the Droid or Droid X. As for receiving, the call quality is the same, although when putting the phone on speakerphone mode, the Droid and Droid X had a slight edge.
Better battery management: This one’s pretty much a universal complaint with Android, but I’ll air it out here, too. With the iPhone’s battery I’m not generally worried about running out of juice half way through my day. Unfortunately, with Android this was a common problem. Maybe, especially in the case of Droid X, it had to do with that huge screen I so dearly loved. (The problem was far more pronounced there.) Or maybe there’s something else, I don’t know. While I tried to curb my battery usage on Android by minimizing things like GPS, wifi, and bluetooth, the fact is that on some days it would run out of battery before the end of the business day. With iPhone I’ve only run out of battery once, during a heavy use day when I was also taking lots of pics.
Camera software: I’m not talking about overall picture quality here, I’m talking about the software itself. The iPhone’s picture software is FAR faster than Android’s. While on Android I might have to wait a second or two for a picture to snap after I had clicked the “Take Picture” button, on Android it’s almost as quick as my digital camera. (By the way, I’m looking for a good, cheap one. Any recommendations?)
Switching between calls: In Android I was almost always hanging up calls if more than one came in. The Droid X included a better interface than the Droid, but I was always hesitant to answer calls. On the iPhone I’ve yet to hang up a call accidentally. To me, this alone is a selling point.

What I’m Still Unsure About

Media: I rather like iTunes, so having access to my library again is pretty awesome. Of course, with the recent improvements to DoubleTwist, this point becomes almost moot, except it serves to remind me that Apple’s overall infrastructure, while sound, attractive, and beautiful in many ways, serves equally well as a pair of golden handcuffs. If I ever switch back to Android, DoubleTwist will be my media savior. (Edit 3/14: Actually I’m pretty sure this one’s about to move to “dislike” territory. I’m not liking the way iTunes works. Seems clunky: too many menus, not enough options.)

Conclusion
So, will I switch back to Android or will I stick with the iPhone when my renewal comes up in a few months? ~~It’s hard to say at this point.~~ Edit 3/14: I’m pretty sure I will switch to Android. Apple’s oppressive thumb is getting to me, and I don’t want to have to break the rules in order to use a product I bought in the way I best see fit. In fact, more than a month after using the iPhone, I’m still feeling like this:

That’s something I definitely don’t like. But that’s just a me-thing, as in “me used to Android” and “me no want to jailbreak to fix Apples mistakes.”
We’ll see if this changes over the next few months, though. End Edit.

I can see why people love their iPhones. I can also appreciate why people love their Android phones. But to be honest, I’ve yet to see anything in the iPhone which would hook me into keeping it. In fact, if anyone asks, here’s my recommendation: Get an Android phone with a hotspot feature and get a iPod Touch. There, now you have the best of both worlds. Of course, if you only want to tote one device around, then either one is fine, although I may have to give the edge to the iPhone just because of the iOS App market. Edit 3/14: Of course, if you value flexibility of any sort, it’s Android all the way.

In all this, one thing’s for sure: using the iPhone has gotten me excited about trying out WP7. It if really is a good balance between the strengths of the iPhone and Android, it may be the perfect phone. Of course, the same can be said for WebOS.

So now, feel free to tell me why I’m wrong.

Edit 3/14: By the way, if anyone’s looking for a Verizon iPhone 4, I’m willing to part with mine if you can offer a good price or trade.

Going Vegan

Published on January 11, 2011 in Featured Posts, Goals and Dreams, Health and Fitness, Life and Personal Development. 4 Comments

New year, new me. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Anyway, the title says it all: we (by which I mean my beautiful wife and I) are going vegan. Mostly. At least for a little while. Frankly, I don’t know if it’ll stick (she loves beef, I love fish), but we’ll see where we’re at in a couple of months.

Why I started thinking about going vegan

Weight loss, weight gain, rinse and repeat: the story of my life. After my amazing weight loss, dropping 99lbs, from 324lbs to 225lbs, I jumped back up to almost 250lbs in a matter of two months. When I saw that I was astonished. I had been exercising, but I slipped up on my eating. Still, 20 pounds? Just like that? I needed help.

You need help, fat boy!

Just to get a professional opinion on the matter, and because I thought maybe medical intervention might be in order (via drugs, not surgery), I went to a medical weight loss clinic. During some tests, it was discovered I have a a complete right bundle branch block (rbbb). In short, this means that due to an electrical issue, the chambers of my heart beat sequentially rather than simultaneously. Usually this is safely ignored (it’s the left bundle branch block you have to watch out for), but it was a show stopper: they wouldn’t do anything until I was cleared by my doctor.

Right bundle branch block - Click for full size

Immediately, I headed to my primary care physician who re-tested and saw the same thing. After comparing it to another EKG from five years prior, he decided further exploration was warranted. (The previous EKG did not show the block.) This led to having an echocardiogram a week later and a pulmonary function test (PFT) a week after that, since right bundle branch blocks, when not benign, are associated with either heart or lung issues. Luckily, it looks as if I’m cleared of both, except for maybe some allergy-related asthma starting to show up. According to the cardiologist, the block had been developing for a long time: there were signs of development in the previous EKG, and may have been intermittent, but never previously caught.

Still, I have heart disease. Sort of. Not the kind normally associated with high cholesterol or cardiomyopathy, but the kind which may be nothing more than a statistical anomaly. Good thing my life insurance is paid up, though.

(For the record, I’m currently at 240lbs. I was told by my cardiologist that the best thing I could do right now is exercise, so I’ve upped my routine to include 6+ miles per day walking at a brisk pace, keeping a heart rate of about 135bpm. Needless to say, I’m really hungry now. Hungry, but holding steady on the weight.)

Why go vegan?

When I found out about this–the rbbb–I started to look at more heart-healthy diets. After some reading I decided that a low-fat vegan diet made sense. It’s ironic that the rbbb was found when visiting a medical weight loss clinic where the plan was to go the Atkins, low-carb route.

There are a lot of reasons why I want to try my hand at veganism, but the two most important to me are as follows:

Ethics

Maybe I’m just a bleeding heart liberal, but I’ve always had a problem eatings things with a face. Not because I’m opposed to eating meat–in fact, I think that it’s a necessity, and a big reason why we humans grew capable of taking dominance of the planet–but because I’m opposed to the industrial complex which produces meat. Hunt it yourself? Have at it. Buying it from the store? You haven’t earned the right to eat that flesh.

Yesterday someone told me how their kid is now asking questions like “where do eggs come from?” This saddened me. A kid shouldn’t ever have to ask where the eggs he eats in the morning come from. They should know, because they should have seen it already. This is not an indictment against this kid’s parent, by any means. It’s a commentary on our society. We’ve grown too far separated from our food, and as such no longer revere it for the blessing that it is in abundance. In fact, we now see it as a curse. Therefore, the ethics of meat eating is quite possibly my biggest reason. Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals crystallized this for me, and put to words a sentiment that has been brewing inside me for quite some time. (To be fair, I do think he takes the sentimental arguments about the pain and suffering of hunted animals a bit too far. Note that I said “hunted”, not “electrocuted in a factory farm and put through a grinder”.)

Pigs confined in metal and concrete pens (Image thanks to the Farm Sanctuary)

Health

This the more contentious issue when going vegan. The first question we get is “Where do you get all your protein?!” For more informed individuals, the questions a more like “Where will you get all your zinc/B12?” Those are good questions. As for protein, the answer’s easy: some plants are LOADED with protein (spinach, beans, and quinoa come to mind). As for zinc and b12…well, I’m still learning. For the moment, those will come via supplementation.

Supplementation? What's that?

More important for me is the focus on the reduced cases of heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer and hundreds of other conditions. The biggest reason, however is that my GERD doesn’t bother me when I go all vegan for a few days, although it does when I eat meat and meat byproducts. An anti-oxidant heavy, alkaline diet will go a long way in treating my GERD, as well as preventing the onset of Barrett’s esophagus. (Note that by vegan I mean fruits and veggies, not a bunch of grains. Processed or not, these still give me heartburn.)

For the record, I’m not knocking some of the other ways of eating out there, such as the so-called Paleo-diets, or the Atkins approach. I’ve done the Atkins diet and lost a fair amount of weight on it back in college. While I’m not interested in doing that now, I do find the paleo-diet is particularly attractive, and this vegan diet may shift to a paleo-diet sooner rather than later. Also, there’s evidence that higher protein diets will actually assist in the recovery of cancer. The theory is that cancer cells use glycolysis for fueling themselves, but are unable to switch to ketosis when the body reduces its intake of sugars. Without fuel, cancer starves.

Nevertheless, a far graver concern for me than cancer is diabetes, which runs strongly in my family (conversely, cancer is unheard of in my family). A low-fat vegan diet has been clinically proven to reverse and prevent diabetes, and although I am not diabetic, I am flat-line hypoglycemic, verified by a 2-hour glucose tolerance test. This means that if I don’t stop it now, it won’t be long before I do become a diabetic. Add to this the anecdotal GERD evidence and you can see why at this point in my life vegan seems like the best way to eat

What approach to take

The first diet that caught my attention was actually a raw food vegan diet. However, I’d tried this before, and after a few days without family support (no way I was selling this to anyone in my family, least of all my wife), this failed miserably. So I decided to scale it back.

Again, I actually thought that a paleo-diet would be a better way to go, but at this time my mind was flooded with the words “heart disease”. Over and over, I saw that a low-fat vegan diet (a la Pritikin) had been clinically proven to reverse heart disease. (The paleo-diet’s evidence was still not as solid.) Unfortunately, this didn’t apply to idiopathic right bundle branch blocks. Still, their claims that it also reversed diabetes, lowered cholesterol, and helped prevent cancer struck me as worth investigating.

After reading around, I found a couple of books to read on the subject matter.

The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter's 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds

Ray Kurzweil - Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health

Caldwell Essesltyn - Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure

Dean Ornish - The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health

I’ll be starting with Rip Esselstyn’s Engine 2 Diet. The biggest reason was that it offered a very clear-cut way to get started, including meal plans, recipes, and shopping lists. Also, it’s an easy read, even though I have a few problems with some of the oversimplifications.
After that I’ll be taking a look at Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. If you know about Kurzweil, you know about his emphasis on longevity, which is why I’m interested in the book. True, it’s not strictly vegan, but I’m sure many of the recipes could be adapted, though mostly what I’m looking for is information.
Next on the list is The China Study. This is one I’ve heard talked about over and over again, and it’ll be interesting to read the information there.

My reading won’t stop there. Books by Rip Esselstyn’s father, Caldwell Esselstyn, as well as those by Dean Ornish will probably make it to my Nook, bookshelf, or both. I’ll also be picking up The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat, because I’m honestly curious. How well I do by going vegan will determine whether I pick this up sooner rather than later.

For now, here’s how we’re starting: first, our fridge is empty. Time to shop. Second, we’re buying kitchen equipment. We needed new pots and pans because ours are ancient, and I want to move away from Teflon.

Family support

As I said, I’ve tried this kind of stuff before. this and other diets. My biggest reason for prior failures? Family.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just weak-willed, but unless I have my wife having a similar diet to mine, I find sticking to any diet difficult. For example, I’ve tried going vegan before, but having my wife bring leftover pulled pork, beef tips, and grilled from her work lunch eventually drove me back to meat. I’ve also tried the other way, going low-carb. Hard to do when chips and salsa are ever present, and when the pulled pork and beef tips are accompanied by corn bread. Given this history, if I’m going to have a chance at success, I need her on-board.

(Note: I’m not blaming my lack of will on her. It’s my life, and my choices which make it up. The fault lies entirely with me.)

Fine. You've twisted my arm. I'll eat that.

Oh, just this once you fuddy duddy!

Considering her love of beef, selling her on a vegan diet wasn’t easy. Inadvertently, I found evidence that the diet could help with one of her more annoying (but not life threatening) medical conditions. Along with showing her that she could lower her cholesterol (which is ~225, although he has an HDL/LDL ratio that’s better than 1/1), and reducing the possibility of cancer (which runs in her family about as strongly as diabetes runs through mine), she decided to try it out. In fact, now she’s excited about it.

(For the record, my cholesterol is already low. Last time it was checked it was about 120 total, with an HDL of 42 and an LDL around 70.)

So what’s next?

Alright, so I’ve laid down my reasons and my plans. Now it’s time to get to work. But I think I’ll keep this on the down-low: I’ve already had people laugh at me and tell me about how they enjoyed a big, juicy burger that very afternoon, while others have, with concern and fear in their eyes, asked me ”So you’re only gonna eat nothing salads? I don’t think I could do that. I need some REAL food.” Then they laugh and try to get me to admit that plant-based foods aren’t “real” food. But this is the kind of stuff that happens whenever you want to do something which differs from what the rest of society does.

Anyway, time to get started. I’m thinking oatmeal, bananas, and all-natural maple syrup.

Oatmeal topped with bananas and maple syrup. OMGYUMYUM!

I am delicious. Eat me.

Side note: Special thanks go out to @thatgirlallie for kicking my butt and telling me to write something.