Tuesday, December 15, 2009

NBA All-Star Voting

Want to hear something amazing?

Tracy Mcgrady of the Houston Rockets played in a game tonight.

This might not seem interesting to you unless you happen to also know this is the first game he has played in for almost a year.

If you still don't think that is interesting then perhaps I should inform you that, as of right now, Tracy Mcgrady is second in All-Star balloting for the guards in the West.

This season he has played a total of 7 minutes and 55 seconds of basketball and if the All-Star game took place today he would start.

Allowing the fans to select the starters for the All-Star team seems like a good idea on paper, but there is just one glaring problem. Fans are idiots. They don't select the players by their contributions to their teams or by their stats. They choose them by who is the best dunker and who is the most popular.

A few years ago when Kobe Bryant was new to the league and he was selected to start in the All-Star game. This wouldn't seem weird except for the fact that he wasn't even starting on his own team.

It's time to do away with this nonsense, NBA. Let the coaches choose the players and let the fans pick their noses. It's probably the only thing they could do right anyway.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

iPhone

Apple makes some of the coolest gadgets on the planet. However that is their biggest downfall in my eyes. All of their items are exactly that - gadgets. When it comes down to it their stuff is more show than go. They take form over function to the extremes.

Let me explain why I feel this way.

I have an iPhone. I love my iPhone and I hate my iPhone. Everybody loves lists so here are the reasons for both.

Love:
//It looks good
- Shiny black with a big bright screen

//It has real internet(most of the time)
- No more looking at only sports or stocks

//It is the best looking portable music player on the planet
- Cover flow is awesome

//Games have nice graphics
- Better than the Nintendo DS, almost as good as Playstation Portable

//Thousands upon thousands of apps
- Anything you can think of from books to games to golf range finders

Hate:
//No user replaceable battery
- Apple tried to make the phone look as good as possible that means no seams for a battery cover. That big bright screen is a battery hog. Most days my iPhone is limping to bed with 10% battery left.

//iPhone specific sites
- The iPhones popularity had made it so a lot of websites are being converted to iPhone friendly websites. Why? Because the iPhone doesn't support flash. FLASH. So now I can't look at the real NBA.com I have to look at a crappy iPhone specific NBA.com with less features.

//That awesome music player has to use iTunes
- In order to make cover flow look good you need all the covers to your music. Is iTunes good at getting album covers when you don't buy the music right from iTunes? No not even close. Before I even got my iPhone I spent about 10 hours fixing all my music to have the right covers. Then I had to move the folder where my music collection was located. iTunes decided that I just doubled my music collection. Who cares if every single song was on their twice and it couldn't find the location of one them. iTunes does have a feature if this happens that shows you all songs that have duplicates. However there isn't an easy way to delete the offending duplicate other than go through the entire list one by one and delete the bad song.

//Those good looking games aren't implemented that well
- It doesn't matter how good a game looks if it's hidden behind your fingers. This makes it so you can't really have games that require too much precise control as you can't really see what you are doing and you have no tactile feedback either. Give me an analog stick and a couple of buttons any day. Some games try to make up for this by using the accelerometer to control what's happening on the screen but it's just to imprecise for anything too complicated. It's great if you want to bounce a sheep into outer space though.

//The app store approval
- Give me Google Voice. I don't care if AT&T is threatened by it. It's awesome and I want it. I'll tell yo what I don't want. I don't want to pay $230 to turn my phone into a turn by turn GPS. I want apps that are going to help me do my homework and save me money.

Now, I know you are looking at my list and thinking that I must despise my iPhone, but this couldn't be farther from the truth. I expect the iPhone to do cool little things because that is how Apple operates. They take normal stuff make it cool looking and easy to use and make you pay out the wazoo for it. As far as phones go I think the iPhone is perfect for people that don't rely on their phone for their business. It's perfect for all the little things like listening to music and browsing the web for the answer to a question that suddenly comes up, but it's not going to solve all your problems.