Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > December
December 2009
Digital Savant returns next year
I’m about to embark on the least-technological adventure of all: childbirth. We’re due next week.
I’ll be out of commission for several weeks, returning Feb. 1 . Of course, if Apple should suddenly introduce the tablet computer of our dreams, I’ll probably dip back in to write about it, but otherwise, I’ll talk you then. Have a great holiday season and a happy new year!
Thanks everyone for reading this year.
— Omar
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#Avatarhype
Earlier today, i posted a Tweet about James Cameron’s upcoming movie, “Avatar,” which is released on Friday.
I wrote, “I heard they’re installing nets behind seats for “Avatar” screenings because your brain gets blown out of the back of your head.”
I added the hashtag, “#Avatarhype.” Because I’m blessed with funny friends who followed it up with some very funny posts with the hashtag, within a half hour, a new Internet meme was born.
One of the things that’s hard to explain to people who dismiss Twitter is how easily and how quickly something silly like this can spread and suddenly involve dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of other people, many of whom you may not even know.
As of right now, you can see several pages worth of #Avatarhype Tweets (some of them Not Safe For Work; you’ve been warned). Some of my favorites are listed below:
- “Avatar” is so awesome it got “It’s Complicated” pregnant. #AvatarHype
- Don’t spoil it for your friends but Avatar actually is shown in 6D. #AvatarHype
- In recognition of Avatar’s special effects, all other movies will only have “effects.” #AvatarHype
- The “Avatar” title font is so beautiful, soccer moms around the world adopted it for all of their outgoing e-mails! #avatarhype
- Seeing Avatar will make your mistresses delete the texts and your wife put down the golf club. #Avatarhype
- Alan Moore is re-writing WATCHMEN and replacing the squid with the release of AVATAR. #Avatarhype
- “Avatar“‘s reach is so deep, that octopus just gave it “Five Coconuts Up.” #AvatarHype
- Garmin has created a new product (the Na’vi) whose sole function is to get you to Avatar screenings #AvatarHype
- People love the effects in Avatar so much that Vermont and Iowa made it legal to marry them. #AvatarHype
The hashtag worked so well that one poster asked, “Is #avatarhype real or an ingenious web 2.0 marketing campaign kicked off by 20th Century Fox?”
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Review: ‘Super Mario Bros. Wii’ for Nintendo Wii
When it was announced earlier this year, “New Super Mario Bros. Wii” looked like an instant classic. A follow up to the successful Nintendo DS game, “New Super Mario Bros.,” it looked like the kind of game that would unite old-school gamers and Wii late-comers. It would combine the classic 2-D gameplay of the original Nintendo “Super Mario” games with the Wii’s family-friendly motion controller and multiplayer gameplay.
On delivery, though, “NSMBW” is an odd duck. It’s polished and playable, of course. It has the clear markings of Nintendo’s A-Game in its intricate level design, subtle touches (though it’s 2-D, the game has bright, clever animation throughout) and enjoyable sound design. But by taking half-measures on both the single-player game and the frantic, near-impossible multiplayer side, this Wii game ends up being neither a classic nor anything revolutionary. In fact, it feels like filler. Very well-made, fun-to-play filler, but nowhere near the standards Nintendo has set with games like “Super Mario Galaxy” and “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.”
First off, the game is incredibly frustrating to play, even in single-player mode. Either I’m aging past my gaming prime or the game’s difficulty has been ratcheted up, but I found myself playing levels over and over again, dying often. Though the game offers a mode that shows you how to get past levels, it’s hardly useful; it’s not hard to figure out how to get past levels, it’s hard to coordinate your brain with your hands with the Nintendo Wii controller to do what you have to do with the split-second timing needed to survive.
Speaking of the Wiimote, the game goes old-school by having you play with the controller on its side. But the game does feature some motion-controlled “Waggle.” In order to pick up blocks and fallen turtles, you hold down the 1 button and shake the controller. Neat idea, but having to do this every time wears out its welcome quickly.
More frustrating is the game’s save system. You can only save your progress at the end of castle levels, which means that if you run out of lives before you get there (and you will. Often), you have to play those difficult levels all over again when you continue or revert to a saved game.
While that ups the (forced) replayability quite a bit, it makes for a game that you more often suffer through than enjoy when the going gets tough. The levels themselves are great and varied, if you can get to them, which becomes a major challenge. I found myself shutting off the Wii in disgust on several occasions when I simply couldn’t progress in the game. Maybe other gamers will feel differently; what feels crushingly difficult to me might be a welcome challenge to someone who typically breezes through games like this.
Multiplayer is hilariously fun at first, but also problematic in that introducing more characters to the mix makes the game exponentially more difficult. Jumps and other maneuvers that are already difficult in single-player become impossible when you have three other characters on screen bumping into you or taking your power-ups.
“New Super Mario Bros. Wii” is made up of some great parts that don’t add up to a cohesive or satisfying whole. It’s exactly the 2-D, old-school-style game that was promised, but there’s something disappointing about a big-budget game that delivers in that respect, but offers little more. As gamers, we sometimes have to be careful what we wish for.
“New Super Mario Bros. Wii
$50, for Nintendo Wii
Rated E for Everyone
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Holiday awesome: man builds ‘Guitar Hero’ Christmas lights
I heard about this last night from CNet, which in turn got the scoop from Make Magazine: a man has turned his garage door into a playable “Guitar Hero” game using 21,268 Christmas lights.
It’s the coolest thing you’ll see today. Trust me; just watch the video:
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AT&T going down same broadband pricing road Time Warner Cable tried (UPDATED)
It all feels a little too familiar.
Though nothing official was announced, de la Vega hinted that the company would reward customers who use less data and seek to educate its customers about bandwidth usage. He also said that a pricing structure that addresses data usage on the iPhone is a possibility.
It reminds me, as it should remind many others, of the kinds of things we heard from Time Warner Cable earlier this year when they suffered a PR disaster in the form of reaction to a trial on tiered bandwidth pricing for its Road Runner Internet service. Then, too, we heard tales of bandwidth hogs who were straining the network and how unfair it was for everyone else who had to pay the same amount for less Internet usage.
In that case, Time Warner Cable compared tiered pricing to the way cell phone companies charge for minutes. Now, one of those wireless companies, AT&T is discussing the possibility that the $30 a month its iPhone users pay for unlimited data usage may not be enough when it comes to the most active users. These users are presumably streaming video, one of the most data-intensive things you can do on an iPhone.
The biggest difference is that in this case, given the iPhone’s relatively closed structure on apps you can download, AT&T can’t insinuate that those same users are illegally downloading mountains of movies and TV shows on the Web. These are users who are downloading apps that are free or that they paid for and using the iPhone in ways that they should be perfectly free to. They’re paying for it, every month.
But, here’s the thing… not only is AT&T going down a very dangerous road with its most connected customers — one that Time Warner Cable emerged from bruised and battered and with no pricing structure successfully initiated — but it’s also using some of the same condescending language. AT&T says it wants to “educate” its customers about bandwidth usage, something Time Warner said as well, but to date, I haven’t seen the results of whatever educational initiatives Time Warner sought to implement.
I’ve received no notice from Time Warner Cable as a Road Runner customer that a bandwidth meter that would allow you to monitor your own usage has ever become available. And the only wisdom I’ve gleaned lately on what might have been is that the average Internet user is said to consume about 34 gigabytes of data a day, which would have been quite an expensive proposition for most customers had Time Warner Cable had its way on pricing. In fact, as Time Warner itself pointed out, Austin might be a city where the average is higher than in the rest of the U.S.
I suppose that’s some kind of learning.
The problem with de la Vega’s statements is that they undercut AT&T’s recent ad campaign, featuring actor Luke Wilson, in which the company refutes Verizon Wireless on its claims about AT&T’s 3G network.
On one hand, AT&T is saying that’s not true and that its network is the best in the nation. On the other hand, it’s saying that there’s a major problem with its most iPhone active users and that action needs to be taken to ensure the 3G network runs smoothly for everyone else.
These arguments aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do point to AT&T’s tricky balancing act. They must acknowledge what every iPhone user knows: that dropped calls and occasional data outages are par for the course, while also defending against Verizon’s potentially damaging (and not necessarily untrue) claims that it has a superior network.
And looming over the horizon is the possibility that the iPhone will become available on the Verizon Wireless network next year, introducing a whole new set of headaches for AT&T.
AT&T is doing itself no favors with public statements about tiered iPhone bandwidth pricing or with its embarrassing ads, which not only fail to ring true, but which seem even more damaging to the company’s credibility given de la Vega’s comments. And it’s sure not doing any favors for Luke Wilson’s career either.
The company acknowledges there are holes in its network and gives customers a tool to report those holes, but its ads seem to suggest a mighty, robust network, certainly not the one that this season’s Verizon ads have mercilessly tweaked.
The mixed messages seem most hollow when we see commercials for the iPhone itself. They highlight all the apps you can download and all the things you can do on AT&T’s 3G network.
The message to customers sound like this: “Yes, you can do all that — but we’d rather you didn’t. At least, not to excess.”
I think time will prove these to be significant media gaffes. It’s painful to see AT&T become the Microsoft of the wireless industry when it comes to confusing marketing seemingly designed to alienate its most loyal customers.
UPDATE: 3:56 p.m.— an AT&T representative tells me that de la Vega’s comments have been taken out of context by most news outlets. You can listen to the entire one-hour presentation here (registration is free).
Here are some excerpts AT&T sent of the Q&A:
From Ralph de la Vega:
“So you are right that about 3% of the smartphone customers are driving about 40% of the traffic. So I’m not going to give you in detail what we’re going to do, but if 3 are causing 40% then we’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites. And you’ll see us address that more in detail…
“What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock. And so we’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage. We have erred on the side of understanding customer behavior first, and then taking action second. But you can rest assured that we’re very, very sure we can address it in a way that is consistent with net neutrality and FCC regulations that are in place or will be in place.”
John Hodulik, Analyst at UBS:
“Right. Now is — we are starting to hear from a number of different carriers about usage-based pricing in wireless, and — but it hasn’t emerged yet. Do you expect that to basically come to the market next year? And has it not come because it’s sort of a systems issue or a competitive issue or a regulatory issue? Or why haven’t we seen user based pricing yet? Or all of the above?”
Ralph de la Vega:
“I think it’s probably a combination of all of those. I think one of the first things that we need to do is we need to educate the customers. And it’s something that customers today have not been used to doing, so we’ve got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data. And so what we’re doing now is we’re improving all of our systems so that we can begin to give customers real-time information about their data usage and begin to get customers educated. And I think longer-term, there’s got to be some sort of a pricing scheme that addresses the usage, but that’s going to be determined by industry competitive factors, regulatory factors and customer [successes].
“So I can’t give you a prediction, other than our first area of focus is to get the information to the customers so they know their own patterns of usage. We did a trial using our landline capabilities, using this same kind of concept. And what we actually found out is customers didn’t know how they were using data, including many parents who didn’t know how their children were using data. But once you alerted them to it, they actually reduced their consumption significantly without anything further than just letting them know that that data was being used in an inordinate fashion.
“So we are going to look at that and address that first, and then we’ll decide where to go based on the industry competitive pressures and regulatory situations.”
Thoughts? Post them in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Internet, Phones
NORAD Santa tracking: oh yes, it’s happening!
Above: Santa and Mrs. Claus speak to Barack Obama, presumably about the government’s work to track the gift-bearer’s sleigh on Christmas Eve. Photo by Charles Dharapak, Associated Press.
The NORAD tracking of Santa Claus, the jolly (and obese) elf from the North Pole who delivers gifts to children, has become an annual tradition, like Austin City Limits Festival and Black Friday store trampling.
The tradition continues this year on Dec. 24 on NORAD’s Santa site, where at 1 a.m. CST (the night before Christmas Eve), the tracking will begin. The Santa Tracker will employ “Santa Cams” as well as Google Maps and Google Earth. You can even follow Santa on a mobile phone at m.noradstanda.org.
And, hey, it’s on Twitter, too.
Are you planning on tracking Santa this year? Let us know in the comments.
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Texas Social Media Awards ‘10: Return of the T’SMAckies!
When I look over the last year, one of the biggest highlights for me was the South by Southwester Interactive-adjacent Texas Social Media Awards (“T’SMAckies” for short).
It was with much nervousness that the American-Statesman embarked on an event to honor those doing great work in Texas social media. It’s always an invitation for fierce criticism to create any kind of list like this, but after much deliberation and work going through the nominations, the three judges — Statesman social media editor Robert Quigley, food writer and blogger Addie Broyles and me — whittled down the list to an amazing group of people who make me proud to be part of the online world.
Nominations for the 2010 event have opened up and you can add to what will probably be a much bigger nomination pool this time around.
I won’t get to be a judge this time. My wife and I are due for a baby delivery later this month, so I’ll be out of the office during the judging period. Instead, last year’s overall winner Michelle Greer has agreed to be a judge.
Remember — you don’t get to complain that somebody didn’t win if you don’t bother to nominate them. Let us know who should be on the list.
I can’t wait for the event itself — it was a great gathering last year and I hope those who gathered were as inspired as I was by all the talent and intelligence in the room.
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One more big one for Google: real-time search
On Friday, I wrote about the big week that Google had.
Apparently, they were saving the biggest roll-out for today. The company is introducing real-time search, which will pop up search results that are happening even as you’re searching.
It doesn’t sound much different from what Google already does. Aren’t Google’s search results pretty up-to-the-minute already?
Yes, but real-time search means that the latest Twitter and blog posts and other information will appear to you on a search results page as you’re reading, bringing even fresher information to you on what was previously a static page.
Not everybody can see this feature yet. When I do a search, I can’t see a window for real-time results, but if you go to Google’s Trends Page and click on any of the top 10, you’ll be able to see it in action. Keep your eye on the page and you’ll see an embedded box with scrolling information. Pretty neat, huh? This is what the future of search will increasingly look like.
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Full reviews of today’s gadget gift guide items
In today’s edition of the American-Statesman, a holiday tech gift guide ran with ideas for shopping at a variety of price ranges.
Here are some of the full reviews that have run in this space of products mentioned in the guide:
- Review of the recent iPod product updates and the Zune HD.
- Motorola Droid hands-on and full review.
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It’s been a very Google week
Maybe it’s something in the water supply at Google Inc. causing everyone to speed up their work and get long-gestating projects out the door before the holidays, but this week was very Googly in a lot of ways.
Almost every day this week, we’ve gotten some news on a new Google project (hey, it’s Google Dictionary!), some new public statement on a long-simmering public debate (say, Google vs. the news industry) or something completely unexpected (the company’s new Google Public DNS initiative).
Today, it was revealed that they’re also acquiring AppJet, a company that specializes in real-time document editing (kinda like Google Wave).
Google even got a lucky break last night when Microsoft’s revamped search engine, called Bing, suffered a very public outage last night.
Meanwhile, rumors still swirl that Google is making its own brand of phones (not to be confused with phones that use the Google-developed Android OS platform).
It would be a Best Week Ever for most any company, but strangely, this is getting to be the usual for a company that seems to get bigger and more influential every week. A little scary when you think about it.
Bonus: my favorite Google bit of the week was this blog post by the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher translating Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent editorial directed at the newspaper industry. A breath of fresh air in what’s getting to be a very tense issue in my line of work.
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Austin company’s ‘SurErase’ wipes the drive (on purpose)
A while back on this blog, I mentioned that my wife and I were considering donating an ancient Dell PC that we haven’t used in years. (How old is it? It was factory refurbished when we bought it. I think it still has Windows ME on it.)
Jim Boyle, CEO of an Austin company called Veriam, asked if I would be interested in trying out his company’s software, “SurErase,” which at the time was about to be released.
Months passed. I wasn’t able to use the software on the Dell machine, partly because my wife’s super busy being 8-months pregnant and hasn’t had time to examine the computer to make sure there aren’t files on the machine she might need.
Boyle instead brought over a very old Dell Latitude laptop for me to try it on. The machine had a copy of Windows XP on it and yesterday, I obliterated the machine’s data. For fun, of course.
“SurErase” is a pretty simple package. It comes in a DVD box and consists of a CD-ROM and an orange USB drive.
When you start up your PC (there’s currently no Mac version) with the disk in the drive, it bypasses the operating system to give you a screen warning you that you’re about to erase the contents of the system’s drive.
Don’t be terrified! It’s all going according to plan!
You’re prompted to insert the USB drive into a USB port and from there it takes several hours for the backup to complete. On this Dell machine, it took about three hours.
When it was completed, I got this notification:
You start out with five erasures — if you run out, you can purchase more through the company’s Web site without having to buy the package all over again. Once that’s done, you take the USB drive and plug it into another PC with Windows installed. This will generate a report on surerase.com that you can access again later:
It registers the data destruction, making it legit for tax deduction purposes or to pass on to someone if you sell or give away your computer.
Boyle says the company’s methods for data erasure conform to Department of Defense and NIST standards.
And that’s it. Software that erases your hard drive isn’t super-sexy or exiting, but all it has to do is work and based on the test run, it seems like “SurErase” works as promised. The only glitch I found was that when I inserted the USB key into a Windows 7 machine after the deletion, nothing happened. I glanced at the instructions and saw that you have to go to the drive and open up a file called “Register SurErase Results” to continue. It would be nice if that program automatically launched to make it truly idiot proof. But the instructions in the disk package are concise and clear, so that’s probably not much of an issue.
Erasing a main Windows system drive is one of those procedures that should be incredibly easy, but I’m willing to bet most users don’t really know how to do. “SurErase” makes it very easy and I dig the USB drive-as-registration tool aspect of the package. The price, $29.97, is cheaper than similar tools I’ve seen, too (except for the well-regarded free tool Darik’s Boot And Nuke.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Austin
Guest post from Joe Gross: reading formats
My wife, who at one time was as much of an old-school bibliophile as I remain, is as voracious a reader as I am, if not more so.
So it was with a little bit of surprise that I noticed a few months ago that she had switched almost entirely to reading on her smart phone (i.e., iPhone, Droid, etc.). I don’t have a smart phone and my experience with e-readers has been limited to in-store demonstrations, but she swears by the thing.
It turns out she swears by it for largely the same reasons that City University of New York dean Ann Kirschner does in an interview she gave to the NPR program “On the Media,” which ran in Austin Nov. 29. Kirschner read Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” four ways — as a paperback, on her Kindle, on her iPhone and as an audio book.
In sum: Her old paperback with all her marginalia was wonderful, but a pain on public transportation; audio books are better than they’re given credit; the Kindle’s nanosecond time delay as pages refresh was a distraction and she had to remember to take it places.
But the iPhone was a revelation. Kirschner didn’t have to remember to take it everywhere, font size could be adjusted and its interface was easy to use. And frankly, the iPhone fits into the way a lot of busy people read — in small bits, fitting it in when they can. Of course, a paperback can be used the same way, but who knows if they will even be around a decade from now. All of these issues are addressed in this particular “On the Media” episode; check it out at .
So my question to readers is this: How are you reading? Books? E-readers? Smart phones? Let us know in the comments section.
(Also, follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/statesmanreader.)
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The Linkdown for Tuesday, Dec. 1
Brrrr, it’s cold in here! Luckily, the cold front also blew in a set of Web links you should go check out. They will make you warmer:
- More SXSW Interactive ‘10 panels are announced today, including one from our own Addie Broyles, “The Yelp Effect: When Everyone’s a Restaurant Critic.”
- Some Dell laptop models are apparently having some severe underclocking issues, slowing down performance. Among those affected are said to be the E6400 and E6500.
- On a less flattering Engadget.com note — they diss Austin barbecue in this post about 4G/Clearwire rollouts! What the…!?
- This month’s Masters of their Domains on Enzoology.com and a Tech Monday column about two Austin companies who were gearing up for Cyber Monday.
- Roku, makers of inexpensive streaming video boxes, introduces new channels for its players.
- High Tech Happy Hour happens Thursday night at Molotov.
- AT&T customer kids can text SANTA to 1224.
- Electronic Arts is releasing a demo of “Dante’s Inferno” called “Gates of Hell” for Xbox 360 on Dec. 24. This seems like unwise timing.
- Big Game Over Videogames event featuring the music of Descendants of Erdric. 5 p.m. Sunday at the Round Rock Store.
- A PC gaming odyssey from a local reader: playing “Divine Divinity” on hard with no saves.
- More AT&T/Luke Wilson ads. They aren’t exactly Wes Anderson-charming, are they?
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Michael Jackson: King of 2009 Yahoo! searches
The King of Pop replaced the Queen of Attempted Comebacks on Yahoo!’s search engine this year.
According to the company, Michael Jackson was the most searched-for term in 2009 (so far), displacing Britney Spears, who had dominated their annual list for the last four years. Britney dropped to No. 5 on this year’s list, behind “Twilight,” “Megan Fox” and “WWE.” Don’t ask me how Britney held on to the top spot for so long. How long will Megan Fox’s reign as More-Searched-For-Than-Britney last?
Yahoo’s! full list is as follows:
- Michael Jackson
- Twilight
- WWE
- Megan Fox
- Britney Spears
- Naruto
- American Idol
- Kim Kardashian
- NASCAR
- Runescape
The company provided several other lists including one for mobile search that shows a few interesting differences:
- Megan Fox
- Mobile Games
- Michael Jackson
- Movies
- Rihanna
- Mail
- Lady Gaga
- NFL
- Ringtones
- iPhone
You can find several other Top 10 lists from Yahoo! including political searches, sports searches and celebrity farewell searches on the company’s Year In Review page.
