Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category

Welcome to the White House (.gov)

To match the inauguration of Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov is completely new and revamped. Design wise, it is exceptionally nice, following the same overall look and feel of Obama’s campaign materials. There are a couple of interesting things from my five minute looking over the site. For the first time, the White House now has its own official blog, with RSS feed and the ability to sign up for an email list (Though it seems to be broken at the moment). This is the sort of thing I have felt all government organizations have needed for awhile. We have very simple and established technology for allowing people to easily get information without having to look for it.

I personally think there should be an RSS feed of all legislation that comes before Congress. I would like to be able to follow what is happening, but as things are now, it is extremely hard to get to that information. Along those lines, one of the initial white house blog posts states that for all non-emergency legislation, the full text will be posted to whitehouse.gov for 5 days before Obama will sign it into law. During that time, the public will be allowed to review and comment.

Here’s to the government moving in the direction of transparency and accountability.

Collection of Web Games

  • Perpetual Motion – the object is to use a bunch of ramps, springs, and sliders to keep a ball in constant motion for a number of seconds. The interface is a little weird and I still don’t know exactly how this scoring works, but its entertaining.
  • How many Countries can you name? – I have posted a few games like this before, but this is the first one that covered all countries on all continents. My issue with spelling continues to hold me back.
  • 99 Bricks -You can think of this as a reverse of Tetris. You are playing with the same 4-block pieces that we all know and love, but instead of trying to keep your tower low, you are trying to make it as tall as possible. That might sound easy until you realize that gravity is in full effect, and wind effects your pieces once your tower gets tall enough.
  • Splitter -Cut things and get the ball to the end, while grabbing the star. It didn’t take me too long to get through, but it was a fun little puzzle.
  • JS-909 -Not really a game, more of a music simulator. Entertaining for at least 2-3 minutes.

Wall-E

Last night, Amy and I went to see the midnight showing of Wall-E. I have been incredibly excited for this movie for a long time, and despite being tired and the fact that the main character only knows like 3 words, it absolutely did not disappoint. I loved the movie, and in fact, might have almost shed a half-tear towards the end of the movie. Anyway, after the movie we were talking about how the various Pixar movies stack up against each other so I decided to actually rank them all. This is sort of a silly endeavor since Pixar simply doesn’t make bad movies. They are all fantastic. My list does not include “A Bug’s Life” which for some strange twist of fate, I have never seen it. The only one I definitely know were to place is “Cars”. I enjoyed it, but it just wasn’t as good as the others. As far as I am concerned the other 7 are almost a tie, but for the sake of ordering them, here you go:

  1. The Incredibles
  2. Wall-E
  3. Ratatouille
  4. Finding Nemo
  5. Monsters, Inc.
  6. Toy Story 2
  7. Toy Story
  8. Cars

The Perfect Pen

I don’t know how picky any of you are about your writing instruments, but I have pretty tight requirements for me to really like a pen. The most important of which is that I want the sharpest, smallest point that I can get find. When I discovered the Uni-ball Signo RT UM-138, I pretty much stopped looking for a better pen. I can no longer use that crazy huge 0.5mm points. 0.38mm points is where its at.

Netflix is great

I totally love NetFlix.  It, along with Hulu and abc.com, has allowed me to watch pretty much whatever I want free and legally without needing to have cable. Sure, I may have to wait for it, but I can get it eventually. Netflix has gotten progressively better over the past year in that they now let you stream unlimited movies to your computer for free if you spend at least $10/month on a subscription. This doesn’t generally include any new movies but for classics or just something to watch when I am bored it works great.

That being said, until today that has been limited to having to use my computer. Sure, I could set up a media PC to watch on my TV, but that takes a lot of effort. Today, Netflix along with Roku announced a stand-alone player for $99. It basically connects to your TV, and streams your movie selections from the internet. You still set up your normal queue on your computer, but then you can select to watch an available movie from your TV and start watching instantly, for free. Cool stuff.

While I am talking about Netflix, I recently discovered FeedFlix which is suppose to give you an analysis of your netflix usage. It isn’t very accurate right now, but I think you have to use it over time before it really gives you anything useful.