Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > November
November 2009
Incomplete video game reviews
Every year around Thanksgiving, I try to spend some time making it through at least a tiny swath of the mountain of video games released from September to November.
Video game reviewing makes up probably less than 10 percent of my job and I’m only one person, so it’s hard to make much progress in the face of so much product, but I do what I can to try to at least hit the big titles. Here’s an update of the games I’m looking at right now (none of which I’ve gotten far enough into to write full reviews):
“New Super Mario Bros. Wii” — This is an example of a game that should be an easy, quick one to review. That’s what I thought. Oh, how wrong I was. After two weeks of playing, I’ve barely gotten to World 2 and find myself cursing at the screen in ways I thought I’d left far behind in my youth. This game is hard. Not hard for Wii-playing kids, not hard for game novices. It’s hard even for someone who’s been playing video games non-stop his whole life. The difficulty is off the charts and I’m playing the game in single-player mode. With more players, the game’s chaos increases exponentially. I’ve heard people declare that this game could lead to divorce. All that being said, the game looks great, has fun power-ups and benefits from the usual Nintendo polish. But I admire the game more than I love it. It’s very difficult to progress, at least for me, and because of the way the game saves work, I often have to backtrack and play through levels I already defeated. If I had to choose one word to describe it, it would be: “Frustrating.”
“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” — Another game I thought I would fall in love with. So far, I’m not in love. Playing in normal difficulty mode, I’m finding it impossible to get past the third level of the single-player campaign. People shoot at you constantly from all sides. It’s an exercise in replay: you have to play again and again to figure out where the snipers are and to keep from getting obliterated at every turn. The game’s early levels are impressively cinematic and “MW2” is constantly throwing you off balance. I was not impressed with a violent and controversial airport scene that, to me, feels gratuitous. I hear the multiplayer parts of the game are much better, but so far the single-player campaign has left me cold.
“DJ Hero” — I love rhythm games, but despite the very nice hardware and good song selection of this game, I’m having a really hard time getting into this one. The turntable controls just feel unnatural and I haven’t invested the time to get comfortable with the set-up. The $120 pricetag seems ridiculous given how cheap guitar controllers have gotten. I’m not really sure who the audience is for a game like this. The replay value seems very limited and I could barely rouse myself past the training levels (which are necessary, but tedious). I don’t know if I see much of a future for this new franchise.
“Left 4 Dead 2” — I hated the Xbox 360 version of “Left 4 Dead” and I’m no fonder of the Xbox version of this sequel. The graphics are muddy, the controls feel imprecise and when you’re surrounded by zombies, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. But I LOVE the PC versions of both games. I bought a copy of the PC “Left 4 Dead 2” yesterday and after playing just a few levels, remembered why I loved the first game so much. On a nicely powered PC, the game looks fantastic, plays smoothly and now has more weapons and more interesting environments to play through. The Xbox version is best ignored.
“Tony Hawk: Ride” — Another strangely conceived $120 peripheral-driven game from Activision. The game has so far earned very mixed reviews and some have maligned the skateboard-shaped controller as a hazard to humanity. Even though I grew up skateboarding, I’m viewing the game with suspicion. It remains in the box, awaiting my attention. I’ll probably risk my life on it later this week.
What are you playing these days? Anything good?
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Twitter Mystery List madness!
For several weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with Twitter’s new “Lists” feature, where you can create a directory of Twitter accounts for other to view, even including people you don’t follow.
It’s a handy way to keep track of people and to group them into common interests or careers (I’m on several for “tech” and “journalists”). But until now, I haven’t figured out a single good way to use Lists. Some people I follow have already created lists for Statesman staffers, for tech journalists and other good groupings, but I haven’t felt it was worth the effort for me to curate a list that seems redundant with other ones out there.
I also thought about creating lists for bloggers or for Austin friends or for social media experts, but again, those lists would be so large they’d be next to pointless.
I started to notice people putting me on lists with vague names, or even incorrect lists. One Twitter account that follows media people keeps putting me on lists like, “USA Today.” I began to wonder if I should just put a list together and not tell people what it was for.
Thus began Omar’s Twitter Mystery List. I decided to turn it into a giant guessing game. I started picking out people for the list and over the next day kept adding more names that applied to the mystery theme.
Last night, I posted about it and got a very small number or responses, but today I offered a $25 iTunes gift card (which I will be purchasing out of my own pocket; it’s not a Statesman contest) and suddenly, I was flooded with guesses on Twitter and on Facebook.
I tried to reply to each guess, offering more clues and information.
The answer, it turned out, was “People who attended SXSW 2009.” Even early on, I had a few guesses that it was SXSW speakers or people on the lineup for 2010, both very close guesses, but not quite there. I kept adding more people to the list, relying on the SXSW festival guide, my news stories from the fest and some careful Google/Twitter searches to make sure the list was correct.
In each case, when someone guessed incorrectly, I was able to point out examples of people on the list who didn’t meet their criteria.
The guesses got more frantic and I struggled to keep up with @replies. There were several good guesses that took me a while to shoot down. One person guessed that the people on the list were all Twitter users with more followers than people they followed and I hunted frantically through the list for at least one or two examples of names that didn’t apply. I finally found two, but for one scary moment I thought I was going to have to award a bonus winner simply because I couldn’t prove them wrong on what was a very good guess.
Several people mentioned SXSW, specifically on a Facebook wall post, and I had to decide whether they were close enough.
In the end, Caroling Lee made several SXSW guesses before she finally won with, “People who attended SXSW last year that you think might attend in 2010.” I deemed it very close, especially since she’s already had previous guesses about SXSW that were almost a win.
It was a lot of fun, but much harder to manage once it picked up steam and guesses and responses were flying back and forth. I began to worry that all my @replies were going to annoy people who weren’t interested in the contest but did follow me and other Austinites who were participating.
I also made one big error: I included Texas State professor Dara Quackenbush on the list even though she did not attend Interactive. I thought I remembered her and Cindy Royal (who did attend) going, along with many of their students, and it was a huge mistake on my part. I took her off the list as soon as I realized the mistake, but it was after the contest was over, unfortunately.
Nevertheless, I think it worked out well — in my responses to guesses, I was able to use lots of Twitter handles of people on the list, which I think spread interest in the contest and made more people aware it was happening. (In fact, one person I’ve never met before replied after they were name-checked and now I’m following them on Twitter.) Several people direct-messaged me asking me to spill the beans before the contest was over, but I rebuffed them, figuring it would be over soon enough.
Once the contest really got going, it took only about two hours for it to conclude. A diverting activity on a slow Monday afternoon and, I hope, fun for those involved.
It proved to me again that Twitter is what you make of it. It’s a platform, nothing more, and you can choose to have as much fun or to express yourself as much as you like. People who find Twitter boring or useless, I’ve found, simply haven’t figured out a good way to make it work for them or haven’t devoted the imagination to try to do something new with it or to make it an extension of their own interests and talents.
It seems like maybe a talent of mine is getting people excited about a $25 gift card and frustrating participants with a Twitter-based mystery.
I’m going to think on how to make the contest more streamlined, less chaotic and without the glaring misstep I made at the end, but I think there will definitely be a Twitter Mystery List #2 sometime soon.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, SXSW, SXSW 2009
Final thoughts on the Motorola Droid
This morning, I mailed back the Motorola Droid phone that Verizon Wireless had lent us to try out for a few weeks.
I always know it’s past time to mail something back when it’s been a few days where the device sits around, unused, nearly all curiosity about how it works and what it does satisfied. As it stood, the Droid’s battery was depleted from sitting idle, unused for most of this week.
But for the first two weeks after the phone’s splashy roll-out, it was in my hands constantly. Curious co-workers and Twitter buddies had lots of questions, the inevitable one being, “Is it better than the iPhone?”
Yes and no. For a phone seemingly built from the ground up to answer all the nagging issue people still have with Apple’s wonderphone, it succeeds in some areas that those who’ve rejected the iPhone won’t be able to resist. It’s on Verizon’s wireless network, which I find to be more reliable and robust. As an iPhone user, I’m used to dropped calls, low signals and the occasional AT&T 3G/EDGE network data blackout. It’s a testament to the strength of the iPhone that so many of us put up with these issues.
On the Droid, such issues all but disappear, but others take their place. For one thing, the phone is simply not as sleek, light or attractive as the iPhone, even with a slightly bigger, brighter screen (3.7 inches). I’ve said it before and I’ll stand by it — the Droid feels like two slabs of flat, black metal of different sizes slapped atop each other. The Droid isn’t homely, exactly, but its weird gold accents and insistent rectangular shape aren’t much to admire. The Droid is interesting-looking, in the way that a giant metal sculpture of a spider might be interesting. You might even admire the design, but it’s not something you’d want to cuddle up with.
The phone’s desktop is spacious and you have several screens to put your widgets and icons, but you’re more limited in that on-screen real estate than on the iPhone and it’s very easy for these areas to look cluttered and disorganized. And, to several people I showed the phone to, it wasn’t obvious that all the apps that aren’t on the desktop can be accessed by dragging across a separate window that reveals them all. There’s something a little clunky about the way that’s all organized, though some of the widgets themselves (like the ones for Facebook and Google Calendar) are impressive and useful.
That said, I did love the phone’s ability to multi-task apps, its supremely tight integration with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts (which only require you to log in; all the sync work is done wirelessly, no PC/Mac required). I still love the way the Android OS unobtrusively handles e-mail and calendar notifications (with a nice strip at the top of the screen that can be dragged down for instant access). Apps are much improved since the last time I played with an Android phone and Android 2.0 map navigation is stellar, the best I’ve seen on any phone.
The physical keyboard will be a selling point to those who abhor the iPhone’s touch-screen typing, but I found it useless, even with its horizontal layout. The keys are flat and, even with all that space, i found it impossible to type on it without lots of typos. The Android dictionary seems more extensive than the one on the iPhone, but even with that, I still found myself reverting to the Droid’s on-screen keyboard option. This one will depend on your preference, but I’ve found it’s worth the time to get used to a virtual keyboard. I just type faster on it.
I found the camera on the Droid, despite having a higher resolution than even the iPhone 3G S to be flaky. It had a hard time autofocusing whenever I used it (an issue I’ve read has since been fixed) and the images and video I took with it didn’t strike me as any sharper or better-looking than ones I’ve shot with an iPhone.
Though the Droid has access to Amazon’s MP3 store, i didn’t find getting music or videos onto the phone particularly easy. You can mount the phone as an external drive (which requires more steps than it should), but if you don’t already have music on the phone, you have to manually create a folder and drag content to it on your computer. There’s software available separately that will help you do this, but it should be much easier to load up your phone with content than it is on the Android platform. This is where the iPhone wins with its iTunes application.
And on that score, the apps on the iPhone are simply more diverse and many more in number than for Android. I was a bit stunned by a recent Newsweek column in which Dan Lyons suggested that, “…over time, a lot of iPhone apps will become available on Android, too. So Apple’s advantage will diminish.”
Really? You think so? Unless sales of iPhones slow significantly, that is simply not true. Most app developers are developing for the iPhone first, Android perhaps second and BlackBerry, Palm, Sybian and WIndows Mobile a distant third, fourth, fifth and sixth. With limited resources, budgets and time, developers are going to keep leaning on iPhone/iPod apps first (don’t forget the iPod Touch is part of that giant audience/ecosystem, too), and I don’t see that advantage going away anytime soon, no matter how excited geeks are about Android as a platform. Those economics will not change anytime soon, even with a good phone like the Droid as an alternative. Especially if the iPhone ends up on Verizon’s network next year (or even 2011).
And that’s the word I keep coming back to when describing the Droid: it’s a good iPhone alternative. The iPhone is not perfect, but it’s slightly more perfect than the Droid, as hobbled as it sometimes seems by AT&T’s network woes.
My thinking on the Droid has been that if there were no iPhone or I was suddenly unable to keep my 3G S, it’s the phone I’d be most likely to buy in its place.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Phones, Shopping
The Linkdown for Thursday, Nov. 19
The Linkdown had an early Thanksgiving potluck feast and is barely keeping bleary eyes open. We’re no trypto-fan of sleep-inducing meals.
What you should be checking out in the Internet right this second:
- Get in on the meme early: trade your unwanted gold for warm, soft cats at CatsForGold.com!
- Like Lincoln? Check out the new Lincoln Memorial Interactive.
- On Twitter, it’s no longer, “What are you doing?” but “What’s happening?”
- Konami has lowered the price on many of its Apple App Store games to 99 cents including “Frogger” and “Metal Gear Solid Touch.” You can see the full list (with links) right here.
- Austin’s Trey Ratcliff makes the New York Times Science blog with his HDR photography and upcoming book, “A World in HDR.”
- MTIShowSpace is a social networking site for theatre folk. No audition required.
- AT&T announces new TV apps for U-verse customers.
- Though we have issue with the nonsensical term “real time reporting” (we just call it “reporting” around here), Austin Post has a new iPhone app that does some pretty interesting things for crowdsourced local news.
- Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “Unfriend.” As in what you do to annoying people on Facebook.
- That’s so fetch! A “Mean Girls” game is coming to the App Store.
- Time Magazine launches its own tech blog, Techland. It’s a bit… uh… visually busy?
- The next Austin High Tech Happy Hour is Dec. 3. There’s also a Tweetup Friday night that I’ll be attending and next Tuesday brings us Austin TweetsGiving, a charity event.
- Twitter, Facebook and last.fm are now on Xbox Live as integrated services. Related: Facebook is on PlayStation 3 now, too.
- This week’s All Tech Considered was about TV on your computer (and back on your TV). Also on NPR this week, I helped put together a music start-ups “did they really exist?” quiz.
- Photos below of last weekend’s Girl Scouts Robotics Competition at LBJ High School. These are from team “Globotics” who took a 2nd-Place Project Award and will go on to compete in a Central Texas FLL Champtionship tournament on Dec. 12th. Congratulations!
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Status updates and Tweets: how much is too much?
I recently was on a podcast for “Age of Lasers,” an epic 1.5-hour chat about social-media pet peeves and one of the more interesting topics that came up was how often people post on Twitter and Facebook and what’s appropriate.
The person who wrote in to the podcast about the issue said that more than three Facebook status updates a day is too much, which alarmed me because I probably post at least 10 to 20 times a day. My Twitter account is linked to Facebook, so all my Tweets go there automatically, but even if that mechanism didn’t exist, I imagine I’d still be posting at least five or 10 times a day to Facebook.
I make the point in the podcast that to me the frequency of posting is much less important than the content. If someone is posting great, relevant or personal status updates or Tweets that really say something, I’m much more forgiving than someone who regurgitates everything they read from their RSS feeds or who machine-gun posts one long message as a string of related updates.
But then, this is all art, no science. There’s no right or wrong here and I admit I could be doing this whole thing wrong. I’m not online etiquette expert (though I do sometimes post arbitrary rules for others to follow).
What do you think? How many times (if at all) do you post a day and is there a limit you should set for yourself?
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Sprint brings 4Gs to the ATX
Yesterday, Sprint Nextel Corp. launched 4G wireless service in Austin, boasting speeds (theoretically) of 10 times what we see on 3G,
The bad news: there’s not a phone that currently can surf at those speeds, though Sprint says we’ll see that next year as well as a netbook that’s embedded with a 3G/4G chip for surfing this faster network.
I met up with John Taylor, a manager of public affairs for Sprint corporate, and he showed me some wares currently available from the company that are able to access 4G (shown in the photo above). Among them is a USB modem, available for free with a two-year contract (at about $69 a month with no data limits), a Wi-Fi device that the modem can plug into to provide a mobile wireless hotspot (similar to, but larger than the Verizon MiFi device we reviewed) and a router that can service even more connections from the same modem. (The router and hotspot device do cost extra.)
We did a quick, informal test in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency on Barton Springs and Congress and got a download rate of more than 6 Mbps. That’s about what my home Internet connection download speed is with a desktop PC wired directly to my router with Time Warner’s Road Runner service.
Upload speed was more than 1 Mbps (faster than my home upload speeds).
We did a little light Web surfing and a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live” on Hulu streamed quickly and without any stuttering. (4G is pretty fast, but it unfortunately did nothing to improve the quality of the January Jones episode itself.)
Taylor was quick to point out that speeds will vary based on location, what kind of building you’re located in and, of course, how congested the network gets. At this point, nobody’s on 4G yet, so the data road was completely clear.
If you want to check out Sprint’s 4G for yourself, Taylor is hosting an informal get-together at Opal Divine’s on Sixth Street Wednesday evening (Nov. 18) from 5 to 8 p.m. He’ll have the wireless card and these devices and will be available to answer questions. Take a look if you have time and let me know what you think.
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Dell phones are coming (but not here)
As is being reported today, Dell is entering the smartphone market with an Android operating system-powered handset to debut in China and Brazil.
No word on when (or if) the U.S. will see the phone, called the “Mini 3i” but rumors have been swirling all year that Dell would enter the market with its own phone this year.
There’s reason for skepticism: Dell’s entrance into the music player market fizzled and the company is only recently becoming known for its industrial design of products like laptops. Smartphones are increasingly becoming defined by their hardware design and their software slickness and even with a refined OS like Android, Dell will find it extremely tough to get a new phone established in the U.S. Even buzz and a well-reviewed product doesn’t guarantee success.
Just ask Palm, which seems to be losing momentum by the day on its Palm Pre, which was the bees’ knees just a few months ago. The winter wave of phones like the Motorola Droid and Cliq have already stolen that thunder.
Did I say the smartphone market is competitive? It’s really really really getting competitive. Careful out there, Dell.
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Review: ‘Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ for PlayStation 3
“Uncharted 2: Among Thieves,” a new video game for the PlayStation 3, begins with its bloodied hero Nathan Drake hanging by a rail from a train car that’s dangling off a snowy cliff.
With no context to draw from, the player is forced to figure out the mechanics of shimmying up the wrecked car as metal splits apart and boulders rain down. By the time you make it back up to safety (if you make it up to safety), you’re left as winded and exhausted as Drake. It’s a stunning opener, enhanced by detailed graphics and expert sound design. There are $200-million Hollywood-studio movies that couldn’t pull off the crackling tension and visual finesse of such a scene.
Midway through the game, it becomes clear that the opener was no fluke. “Uncharted 2” is one of year’s best video games, a highly polished gem that regularly surprises and wows in ways that other interactive entertainment rarely achieves. Drake, a kind of globe-trotting Indiana Jones with hair gel and CW-Network-good looks, dodges armored tanks on the streets of Nepal, hunts for artifacts in the jungles of Borneo and in one jaw-dropping sequence, does battle with a helicopter from a moving locomotive.
It’s what happens when what feels like Sony Entertainment’s entire production budget is poured into making a game with bleeding-edge production values. Whatever digital trickery was put in the service of making Drake’s adventures so cinematic and large-scale paid off. Though it moves at a breakneck pace for about 15-20 hours of play, you could stop at any moment and admire the play of streaming light on cave walls or the contents of a high-rise tenement as it literally collapses around you from rocket fire.
Drake is following a trail left behind by Marco Polo to a legendary jewel in the lost city of Shambhala while being pursued by (wait for it…) a bad guy with connections to Nazis. The story isn’t ground-breaking, but the third-person characterizations of Drake, his romantic interests and even routine thugs are beautifully rendered. Drake in particular — who is given to the occasional curse word and lots of pithy dialogue — works well as a leading man and goes beyond the generic stand-in of most action/adventure games. You won’t confuse the characters in “Uncharted 2” for real movie stars, but there’s impressive range of emotions and good work on the motion-capture front.
All of the eye- and ear-candy would be pointless if there wasn’t a solid game to play through. “Uncharted 2” combines elements we see in other modern games — good climbing and jumping mechanics, simple gunplay controls and a clever cover system for evading attacks from enemy henchmen. On some levels, you’re climbing ledges and solving puzzles (echoes of “Tomb Raider” abound), in others you’re engaging in firefights and blowing up stuff. You might find yourself dodging obstacles atop a train or hopping rooftops while under fire. Unlike many games where disparate gameplay elements never feel cohesive, “Uncharted 2” never leaves you bored or frustrated. If at any point in the game you truly feel stuck, you can get an optional hint to help you through. You’ll want to play through the game’s entire 26 stages because no one piece of the game feels short-changed; it’s gorgeous and fun to play throughout.
There’s even a multiplayer mode that takes the well-conditioned gameplay online in several modes like “Plunder” and “Deathmatch.”
But it’s the single-player adventure that makes “Uncharted 2” a standout on a game console that’s had very few exclusive games of this quality. Set piece after set piece transports you and dazzles you with engaging, pulse-quickening fun.
It looks like it’ll be a good holiday season for games, but even in a crowd that includes “Modern Warfare 2” and “Dragon Age: Origins,” “Among Thieves” is a must-own for PS3 gamers.
“Uncharted 2: Among Thieves”
$60, for PlayStation 3
Rated T for Teen
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The Linkdown for Wednesday, Nov. 11
The Linkdown is pausing to reflect on Veteran’s Day. Here are a few links you should check out for tech news and upcoming events:
- Universal Studios announces some new Blu-ray features for its holiday lineup of movies, including iPhone/iPod Touch apps, mobile content and other stuff. Movies include “Bruno,” “Funny People” and “Inglourious Basterds.”
- The Zune HD, which we reviewed recently, now has access to free video games (free with ads, that is).
- The Austin chapter of the Association of IT Professionals gives out some awards.
- Two upcoming Austin social networking events: TweetsGiving ATX and a Nov. 20 Tweetup.
- Time Warner metered billing. Gone, for now, but not forgotten
- The people who put on the Webby Awards now have a daily newsletter where they’ll tell you what the best sites are.
- Google is giving away free Wi-Fi in airports this holiday season (including Austin), but they may benefit from the “free” part.
- This week’s All Tech Considered: Motorola Droid, Dell’s Adamo XPS and “Epic Mickey.”
- And while I’m self-promoting, my friend David T. Cole and I have started a weekly tech podcast called “Age of Lasers.” Warning: the language gets a little salty, so please don’t listen if you’re easily offended.
- The Amazon Kindle PC reader is out. No Mac version yet.
- CNet presents some online tools for wedding planning.
- The Dell Inspiron Zino HD tiny computer (think Mac Mini) is now available.
- “Star Trek Online” has a release date: Feb. 2, 2010.
- Help Trey Ratcliff decide the best way to give away copies of his new book.
- “Portfolio Posse” from Austin ACM SIGGRAPH happens Nov. 19. You can RSVP on Facebook.
- SXSW ‘10 news: more panels announced, keynote speaker Daniel Ek of Spotify.com listed.
- How social media is changing local news (via Mashable and featuring our own @statesman).
- Non-profits and techies coming together this weekend for Non-Profit Bar Camp.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets, Internet, SXSW 2010, Videogames
For Veteran’s Day: teleconferencing and one military family
My dad was in the Air Force; he’s retired now, but for years and years, his service defined my family’s life — we got used to living in one place no more than a few years. Though at the time, I always hated leaving behind friends and adjusting to new schools, I now look back on my time as an Air Force brat (especially several years we spent in West Germany just as the Berlin Wall was coming down) as the most more formative of my life.
Whenever I see people embracing technologies like Skype and webcams to keep in touch with loved ones, I always remember how cut off we felt living overseas. We didn’t see the rest of our family for years at a time and had only phone calls and mail to keep us connected.
Alison Buckholtz, a Washington D.C.-based wife of a Navy pilot, offered to write a guest entry for Digital Savant today, including an excerpt from her book, “Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War,” reprinted with permission from Alison and from her publisher, Tarcher/Penguin. She writes about how mobile technology and teleconferencing are changing the military family experience. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll take the time to read it.
On this Veteran’s Day in particular I think we’re all thinking about those who protect us and the constant stress and danger they face.
I think about my husband Scott, an active-duty Navy pilot currently serving a 12-month deployment in Baghdad, every day — Veterans Day is no different. But today I do reflect more deeply on the experience of American military spouses throughout history. During this deployment and my husband’s many other absences, when I am left to care for our two young children, many people have asked me “How do you do it?”
I always answer with one word: “Technology!” Military spouses of the past depended on out-of-order letters, unreliably delivered, to convey news as profound as the birth of a child or as mundane (but important) as that child’s first tooth.
Today, however, my husband and I keep in touch via phone, e-mail (with plenty of photo attachments), and video teleconferences. He may be far away, but he watched our four-year-old daughter get her first haircut, courtesy of my iPhone. Modern technology means that he’s closer to home than previous generations of service-members have been in a time of war.
Although many URLs are off-limits to service-members now (like photo-sharing Web sites), and Internet connections sometimes prove too slow to be useful (as with Skype), technology allows us to experience day-to-day life as a family. My husband won’t return a stranger to us. And as for my daughter’s first haircut, I learned that sometimes there’s no substitute for the postal service after all: I mailed him one of her curly locks that very day.
Excerpt from Chapter 23 of Allison’s book: In this section, I talk about a video teleconference that my son Ethan (age 5) and daughter Esther (age 3) and I had with my husband, Scott, who was then in the middle of a seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. My children and I then lived near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island (Washington).
Technology is amazing, and the way the military has exploited technology to help deployed troops and families communicate with each other was a revelation to me during Scott’s deployment. I got the first e-mail about our video teleconference (or VTC) from the squadron’s senior enlisted Sailor, the Command Master Chief, who worked hard to make sure all of the enlisted sailors signed up for slots first. (They had more limited access to e-mail than the officers, since many of them — metalsmiths, mechanics, electricians and ordnance technicians — do not routinely sit at a desk or have easy access to a computer.) Once sailors signed up, the officers had their chance. And before the week was up, Ethan, Esther and I found ourselves driving to base.
“You’ll get to see Daddy on TV, and talk to him, and he’ll talk to you,” I clumsily explained to them on the way over.
“I want him to come out of the TV,” Esther objected.
“Why won’t he come out of the TV?” Ethan asked.
“He’s still on the boat, but you can see and talk to him and show him stuff. Ethan, what song are you going to play for him?” Ethan brought his violin along.
“I’m going to show him my plucking. I am really good at plucking,” Ethan said.
“That’s great. Esther, what do you want to show Daddy?”
“My new black shoes,” she said. “And my new tights. They’re just like a Mommy wears.”
“And I brought my planet puzzle,” Ethan added. “I want to do the puzzle for him while he’s watching.”
“OK, but we have to remember we only have ten minutes, then we have to let someone else have a turn.”
“But I want him to come out of the TV,” Esther repeated.
“I know, me too,” I said. “I’m mad about it.” That was my new strategy. Whenever the kids seemed to be angry about Scott’s absence, I told them I was angry too. Ethan especially loved to see me pumping my fists in the air in an exaggerated pantomime of infuriated motherhood, so he picked up on it right away during our drive to the VTC.
“That stupid boat!” he exclaimed.
“Stupid boat!” Esther echoed.
“Daddy hates that boat, right?” Ethan asked. “He wants to be with us instead.”
“Daddy wishes he could be home with you,” I said. “But he’s really good at his job, and they need his help. That’s why we’re so proud of Daddy, because he does such a great job.”
“Stupid aircraft carrier driver,” Ethan muttered, ignoring me. “I wish he would turn that boat around.” We’d hit upon his favorite theme. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the aircraft carrier driver’s fault, Ethan always heaped the full force of his hatred on that poor helmsman, whoever he was. He craved a target for his anger.
“We’re almost there, guys,” I said. “Let’s just remember to take turns talking to Daddy.”
The VTC technician warned us there would be a couple-second delay in the audio and video feed, which she thought might confuse the kids. But it wasn’t the kids I was worried about; I was far jumpier than I had anticipated. It had been such a long recovery since Scott walked out the door that dark morning in November. From the time I first heard about the VTC, I felt shaky, as if Scott took a step toward us only to back away again. But it was easy to push those anxieties away as my excitement at seeing him carried me forward. I spent so much time wondering about his life on the boat, and how he coped. His e-mails to me were frequent, loving, and supportive, but very short — just a few lines at most. Whenever I asked how he was doing, he simply said he was tired.
So I turned to poetry, my old standby, to get a sense of Scott’s experience. I found “Here, Bullet,” a collection penned by one of the first warrior-writers of the Iraq war, an infantryman named Brian Turner. He didn’t let me down:
At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights
blacked out under the wings and America waiting,
a year of my life disappears at midnight,
the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below
small as match heads burned down to embers.
Scott and his squadronmates flew six-to-seven hour missions nearly every single night around that time, logging so many hours above the norm that they required written waivers and interviews with the air wing flight surgeons. I re-read that poem, “Night in Blue,” whenever I thought Scott might be in the air. I especially liked the middle section, because I remember how long it took for Scott to explain to me his impressions of the war after he flew in it the first time, in 2003, and how disjointed and difficult those conversations were for him.
…What do I know
of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have
to say of the dead - that it was worth it,
that any of it made sense?
I have no words to speak of war.
I knew the VTC would usher in no great revelations, and no talk of war, especially. I wasn’t quite sure what I would say. Life during deployment mirrored the enjambment of Turner’s poem as events, impressions, thoughts and questions ran from line to line, day to day, without a break or even a cue for a breath. None of that mattered, of course. I just wanted to see how Scott looked, and watch him smile as he took in the kids’ antics.
“Daddy, come out of the TV,” Esther shouted as she ran into the conference room. Scott’s face hovered on a monitor across the room. My heart leapt as it had on our first date, when I opened the door and saw him standing there, patiently waiting for us to begin the rest of our lives together. We seated ourselves around the conference table. The kids and I spotted ourselves in the picture-in-picture screen on the monitor, so we knew Scott could see us. There was the smile I’d been waiting for. He looked so handsome in his desert flight suit, though he seemed thinner and had more gray hair, especially around his temples. But he seemed in great spirits, and he reconnected with Ethan and Esther immediately as they scrambled to exhibit their special things.
“Daddy, watch! Daddy, watch!” They overlapped each other as Ethan plucked away on the violin, then hurriedly put it down, picked up a pen, and wrote his own name while Scott oohed and aahed. In the months since Scott left, Ethan, then four and a half, began reading and writing, and he was excited to show off. He threw down the pen, and grabbed his planet puzzle, frantic to fit it together under Scott’s approving gaze and within the time constraint.
“Daddy, watch! Daddy, watch!” Esther, then two and a half, sank deep into her seat so she could prop up and display her new black patent-leather shoes on the conference table. Then she stood on the chair and pulled down her tights to show Scott her “big girl underwear.”
At minute eight, the kids finally calmed down and turned to other curiosities in the room, examining the microphone and leaving Scott and me a moment to connect. We forgot our own rules, mistaking the delay for real-time pauses, talking over each other, then giggling and both insisting, “No, you go ahead” at the same time. It didn’t matter. There was nothing we had to say that we hadn’t already said in scores of e-mails, dozens of letters, and a few staticky phone calls.
The VTC coordinator cracked open the door to the conference room. Even the kids knew what that meant.
“Daddy, come out of the TV! Now!” Esther insisted, a new urgency aflame in her tone.
“I can’t, baby,” he said sadly.
“We just got our one-minute warning,” I told Scott.
Esther jumped out of her chair and ran toward the monitor. She wrapped her arms around it, pressed her cheek to the screen and closed her eyes.
“Esther, where’d you go?” Scott called. “I can’t see you anymore.”
“She’s hugging you,” I said.
Photo of Alison Buckholtz and her kids. Photo provided by the author.
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Another crazy flood of holiday video games
I remember it well, the holiday season of 2007 when even the most hardened of video game players had to admit that they were being overwhelmed by fantastic games like “Rock Band,” “BioShock” “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” and “The Orange Box.”
Last year was great, but simply not in the same league. This year, however, we’ve already seen some serious Game of the Year contenders and more triple-A-list games are on the way.
I’ve been playing Sony’s extremely polished “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves,” which I’ll review here soon and it’s stellar. A new 2-D Mario game arrives soon for the Wii (“New Super Mario Bros. Wii”). On the horizon are two more high-profile sequels, “Assassin’s Creed 2” and “Left 4 Dead 2.”
The sequel to “Call of Duty 4,” titled, “Modern Warfare 2” hit stories today to great reviews. “Dragon Age: Origins” and “Tekken 6” both hit recently and though it seems like the enthusiasm for “DJ Hero,” “Brutal Legend” and “Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time” seems to be fading while earlier releases like “Beatles: Rock Band,” “Batman: Arkham Asylum” and “Borderlands” are riding high on good word-of-mouth.
How do I play all these games for my Statesman coverage? The simple answer is that I don’t. There’s never enough time to get to every game. In 2007, I never got very far into “Modern Warfare” because of the crunch (oh, the regret!) and to this day I’ve never played “Gears of War 2” or more than the first few hours of “Fallout 3.” Something has to give and I usually end up having played only about 30 percent of the titles I wanted to get to. A huge RPG like “Dragon Age” would be disastrous for me, but I will definitely give “Modern Warfare 2” and “Left 4 Dead 2” a go since those are much easier to get into in short doses. As soon as I’m finished with “Uncharted,” I’ll move on one of those games or maybe bypass them in favor of the new “Mario” game.
Do you have a plan of action for the holiday season? Do you usually just stick with one or two games through November and December or do you try to play everything in sight? Let me know in the comments.
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Sony’s PSPgo problem
On Sunday, I was looking at the newspaper circulars and made my weekly trek through the paper aisles of Best Buy, Conn’s, A&B TV and other tech purveyors.
I noticed in the Best Buy circular that the Sony PSP was featured on the two-page spread with all the other major video game consoles. But it wasn’t the newest iteration of the portable game console, the PSPgo, which costs about $250. It was instead the older, cheaper ($170) PSP 3000. Listed next to it were UMD-disc-format movies and UMD-disc-based games for the PSP.
I’ve written before about the challenges Sony faces with the PSPgo — the company eliminated the UMD drive to make the new PSP a more energy-efficient digital-downloading machine. It relies on the Sony PlayStation Store to download games, movies and other content.
It’s forward-thinking in an admirable way, but it also is not practical for gamers: you cut yourself off from the back library of UMD-based games and movies (especially stuff that ends up in the bargain bin you might want to grab) and has the same problems as other copy-protected digital content. You can no longer lend out or trade games, or resell them to GameStop to buy newer games when you’re done. Obviously, digital distribution is where video games are going, but Sony has waffled by keeping its older system out there. The PSP 3000 model offers more access to existing games and movies. And it’s $80 cheaper. Can you see a smart strategy anywhere here for the PSPgo? Because I sure can’t.
And, judging from the Best Buy circular, it’s also going to be hard to convince retailers to promote a system that essentially cuts off a revenue stream of game and movie sales for them. Why would Best Buy want you to buy a PSPgo? Clearly, they should hope you get a PSP 3000 instead and keep buying UMD-based games and movies in their stores.
When you eliminate the retail chain and get your games directly from Sony, that means there’s no competition on specific game titles, no sale prices to spur walk-in traffic and no trade-ins. It’s hard to see why a gamer who knows the difference in features and price between the PSPgo and the PSP3000 would choose the former.
The PSPgo recently debuted in Japan to weak sales. It’ll be interesting to see where the momentum goes, but so far the PSPgo seems like a device that serves no one except Sony. And it’s not serving Sony very well so far, either.
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Dell’s Adamo XPS laptop: unboxing and hands-on
Representatives from Dell Inc. visited the American-Statesman this morning an hour before unveiling to the world the new Adamo XPS laptop.
We’ve seen glimpses of the laptop before, most notably at Austin City Limits festival, but this was the first time I’ve gotten my hands on it and see it up close.
The laptop is only 9.99mm thick and, design-wise it’s breathtaking. The entire bottom half of the laptop folds into a recess in front of the 13.4”-inch screen. The slim computer starts at $1,799 and that gets you 4 Gigabytes of DDR3 memory, a 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 128-GB solid-state drive, Wireless-N and a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit edition installed.
The most interesting design characteristic of the Adamo XPS is that the keyboard rises on a hinge to give it an angled profile. I pressed against the keyboard and it has a bit of give — it doesn’t seem too stiff, but at the same time, despite its aluminum construction, I’d be worried about putting too much weight on it. At the very least, it’s a good way to wean yourself off of laying your palms below the keyboard, as I tend to do with my Macbook.
In any case, here’s a video where you can make your own impressions on the ambitiously designed little laptop from Dell:
Image from Dell’s Flickr stream.
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AT&T confirms 3G outage this a.m. in parts of Texas
I got several messages this morning from iPhone users complaining that they weren’t getting 3G service early this morning.
AT&T confirmed that there were outages in Austin, San Antonio in Harlingen and said the equipment issue has been resolved. In a statement e-mailed from AT&T representative Mike Barger, the company said:
“Due to an equipment issue that began this morning, 3G data service for some customers in Austin, San Antonio and Harlingen may have been disrupted. The issue was resolved around 9 a.m. and service was fully restored. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.”
I didn’t notice the outage because I was at home on a Wi-Fi network at the time, but when I checked after 9 a.m., 3G service seemed to be working fine in New Braunfels and up IH-35 to Austin.
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Motorola Droid: hands-on video
Verizon Wireless allowed the American-Statesman to take a sneak peak at the new Motorola Droid smartphone. It debuts Friday with the Great Hills Trail Verizon Wireless store opening up at 11 p.m. tonight to offer the phone to early customers at midnight.
Other area stores will open at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning and retail sales manager Trevor Bissell says the company is expecting lines for the device, which competes most directly with Apple’s iPhone, as you might have noticed in recent ads.
Verizon let us borrow the phone and I’ll be posting more about my thoughts on it soon. My first impression is that hardware-wise, it feels a little heavy and dense, with harder angles than the iPhone.
That said, it has a beautiful, big screen (larger than Apple’s phone) and the Google Android operating system runs smoothly and quickly on it. It’s very tightly integrated with Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google services and I was pleased with the phone’s Web surfing speed. I’m still not a fan of tiny physical keyboards but this one has nice, large well-spaced-out keys for those who can’t handle an on-screen virtual keyboard.
One major annoyance: a sound effect that says in a creepy, deep robot voice, “DROID!” is cute at first and very annoying after the third or fourth listen. It’s easy to disable.
Like I said, I’ll post more about it soon. It’s far too early to say whether it’s better or worse than an iPhone, but it certainly has some unique features that might make iPhone users jealous.
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AT&T sues over Verizon’s 3G map ads
AT&T has filed a suit against Verizon over that company’s commercials featuring colorful maps comparing their 3G wireless service to AT&T’s.
The maps suggest that Verizon has five times the 3G wireless coverage of AT&T, but in the suit, AT&T believes that commercials misleading suggest that the white areas of the AT&T map make it look as if no wireless coverage is available in large parts of the country.
And, of course, it didn’t take long for a clever headline writer to suggest that in such matters of disagreement, “There’s a lawsuit for that.”
What do you think? Were you misled by the commercials or did you get that it was talking specifically about 3G areas? Let us know in the comments.
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The Linkdown for Monday, Nov. 2
The LInkdown can’t believe it’s already the month that turkeys fear. Wasn’t it just July a minute ago?
Here is the Internet reading you should be doing today:
Coolest news of the week: Austin’s Eugene Hsu (pictured at right) of Challenge Games has accepted a Seattle job as merchandise marketing manager for the Cheezburger Network. We’ll miss him, but hope he gets lots of $$$ from those LOL guys.
- The creators of the very funny Fake AP Stylebook account on Twitter have been unmasked by Wired.
- Awesome wedding gift story with a tech/GPS twist.
- The Texas Wireless Summit is on Thursday.
- Austin’s Game Salad has introduced a $99 Express membership plan for would-be iPhone game publishers.
- A playable demo for “God of War III” for PlayStation 3 will be included on the Blu-ray version of “District 9.” Nice!
- Is Apple working on a $30-a-month TV subscription service? That would be a game-changer.
- Stuff from the paper: 10 scariest social media monsters (with great illustrations), “Fairy Godmother Academy” and its digital team and Tech Monday story on how smartphones are edging out gadgets like the Slacker G2 music player.
- Last week’s NPR All Tech Considered was about e-books like the new Barnes & Noble Nook.
- Site tries to take the pain out of doing an office Secret Santa.
- Roku has introduced a new $129 streaming device that now includes Wireless-N Wi-Fi.
- The next Austin Bleetup is Thursday at Mohawk. You can RSVP here.
- NCsoft’s “Aion” topped the PC game sales charts in its debut. Meanwhile, ex-NCsofter Richard Garriott is still really into space stuff.
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