The Wii itself

It’s a thing of beauty, approaching the level of product design slobbering usually reserved for Apple. The buttons have perfect feedback, the shiny white doesn’t show fingerprints nor seem to get dirty and (nearly) everything works exactly as you’d expect without reading the instructions.

The console is tiny, which at first made it look kind of silly sitting in place of my (now gone) Playstation 2. Now I’ve come to appreciate the space surrounding the console as a signifier of quality, like gobs of whitespace denoting a luxury product.

Mii’s are hilarious, and if you spend a little bit of time focusing on each facial bit separate from the whole, you can get an pretty amazingly accurate rendition of yourself. Coming back to a blue glow means somebody out there in Wii-land loves you. (Send me love!: 2410 7465 0051 7859)

Virtual Console

Playing old games from my childhood was a huge OMG! moment for me when I read over the specs, and while I can respect Nintendo’s decision to roll out the games over time, the greedy part of me wants to open up Virtual Console and see thousands of games, just waiting to be downloaded. So far I’ve gone on a Mario kick, grabbing Mario 64 (which I never played, as I didn’t own a N64), Super Mario World (one of my all-time favorites) and Super Mario Bros. I totally forgot how stingy the original SMB was with 1UPs — it’s a bit of a bitch to try and rush through. (Although it’s super easy to hit World 5 in about 2 minutes, remember how?) A neuroscientist should definitely do a study on why I can’t remember the names of highways but can still pinpoint each mushroom/flower/coin block 20 years later.

I also downloaded ToeJam & Earl, thinking it would be a hilarious game for Brittany and me to play together. I was pretty anti-Sega back in the day (although I did eventually own a Dreamcast) but remember playing this at a friend’s house in 5th or 6th grade and loving it. Online reviews say it’s still worth playing, but I’m having trouble getting back into it.

Zelda: Twilight Princess

The greatest Zelda ever made. Period. Reason enough to purchase the Wii; even if all it did was play Twilight Princess it would still be worth the cash. The controls are intuitive, the visuals gorgeous and the story engaging.

I’d say more here, but it would just be compliment after compliment after compliment.

Wii Sports

I’ll give Wii Sports more props than “tech demo for the Wii-mote”, but there’s a pretty big difference in fun between the games. Bowling is incredible; what it may lack in realism it more than makes up for in addictiveness. Tennis is a bit slow to start, but once you boost your ranking above 1000 the AI makes for a pretty tough opponent. (Be sure to branch out and try different strokes; slices, spins, etc. The more you pretend it’s really tennis, the more accurate the controls seems to be.) Golf is decent but boring. Baseball even worse — it’s just pitching and hitting, neither of which take any skill on your part. Boxing could be a ton of fun, but I think the controls are horrendous.

WarioWare, ExciteTruck, Super Monkey Ball

WarioWare: Smooth Moves is … unique. I purchased it specifically to be a party game, however you can’t actually play “multi” until you beat the game in single-player mode. Then to top it off, it doesn’t support multiple Wii-motes. Huh? It was either rushed out the door, or the game designers are morons. Two reasons to still give it a chance: the oddball descriptions of each position, and the can shooting game. (The can shooting game is intense.) Game review sites seem to love, so maybe I’m missing something…

Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz: I bought this to be a party game as well, but I found it to be more frustrating than fun. Sold it back to the store.

ExciteTruck: It’s definitely a launch title, but a pretty damn good one. Steering with the Wii-mote is surprisingly accurate, once you get a feel for how far to rotate your hands. It was great to play together (Britt and I) until we unlocked Super Excite mode, and then we promptly stopped because it gets hard. Maybe we’ll come back to it someday soon. There’s a plethora of vehicles to choose from, but they all pretty much suck except for a couple. Completing a race perfectly, with all the boosts, rings, smashes, etc. definitely gives you a huge rush.

Opera, streaming music, Wii Transfer

Opera’s trial browser gives you such a portal into expanding the functionality of the Wii. Mostly I stream music through Finetune (finetune.com/wii), which is a decent enough experience. The interface was designed very Wii-like which is great, but their selection of songs can be a bit lacking at times. I search via a specific artist, it plays similar songs — but usually I run through all the songs it relates to the artist within a couple of hours and have to search again.

I’m most excited about Wii Transfer by Riverfold Software — it’s a tiny server you run on your Mac that gives you access to your entire iTunes library (with playlists + album art support!), plus access to your iPhoto library. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get the software to actually work, but don’t let my experience thwart you. Manton’s been trying to sort it out with me via email, and the software seems to work for everybody else.

Upgraded to the new Wordpress 2.1, simple as always. The admin’s a bit cleaner (although I’m still not a fan of the blue) and things appear to be organized a little better. Seeing the autosave down at the bottom of my post window is a nice touch. Font sizes appear to be boosted up a bit — a bit easier to read. The new Blogroll feature seems to be marked improvement over the old Links bit, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. I’m currently only running a couple of plugins (Akismet, Feedburner & Markdown), all of which are playing along. (If anybody knows of a way to auto-translate old posts from Markdown to Textile…)

Also had to splurge for the new version of Mint — wow. Great update to the interface, although it feels a bit … pokey. (Most likely it’s just my machine, Firefox has been running slower and slower each day.) The new Bird Feeder Pepper looks incredible, but the setup is a bit of a bitch — I’m still not sure if I have it installed properly. 99% of what Shaun Inman puts out has an unbelievable amount of polish on it, but I can’t help feeling when I read through his documentation that there’s a bit of the curse of knowledge going on there. Definitely worth the $19, and I love the new look of Junior Mint. I’m sure there will be a flurry of small fixes and updates over the next month or so, as the new forums are hoppin’. As a sidenote, the new haveamint.com looks great, with the integrated account management, forums and Peppermill. Hopefully we’ll start seeing some cool new Peppers!

I recently picked up an iPod shuffle for the sole purpose of using it while I exercised. I’ve never been the type to walk the streets with the world shut out, most because I found it too cumbersome to deal with my iPod Photo; the added weight, the cords, do I keep it in its sleeve or risk a scratch, etc. (I baby my toys.)

The shuffle has transformed me into a walking Apple commercial though, complete with white cords. Clips inside my jacket, comes with slightly shorter headphone cables (thankfully), I push one button and away I go with a soundtrack to replace the consistent asking for change that is the norm on Portland streets.

I wasn’t sure how I’d take to the lack of a screen — I’d say it’s a mixed bag. I only put full albums selected by hand on the thing; I’ve found I try and memorize the order of the albums so I can push “forward” 15 times to get to the next one if needed. iTunes gives you a neat “AutoFill” feature that erases what’s on there and fills it up with a grabbag from your library — you can even tell it to give more weight to songs you rate higher. Because Britt’s got some crap country songs in the library, I’m too scared to use it though. The last thing I want is to be walking downtown to Heads Carolina, Tails California.

I thought having more opportunities to listen would give me a chance to catch up on all the podcasts I’m subscribed to, but this is one area where the lack of a screen really nixed that. You can’t just throw on a few episodes of whatever and then decide what you’ll listen to, because each episode has the same intro music that lasts upwards of 30 seconds, then intro talk where they (hopefully, finally) announce what that episode is about. By the time I figure out which one I want to listen to, I’m already at my destination.

One of the best productivity boosts I’ve gotten from it is throwing a long pink noise mp3 on there and listening to that while reading/writing in a public space. Working on the computer I use the excellent app Noise from Blackhole Media — no need for the shuffle. (Turn it down pretty low and start working, you’ll be surprised how well it works!)

I can’t say it any better than the Shopify guys did on their blog so:

Running an online store is a dream, right? You receive an order in Shopify, package up your product into a box or mailer, use some tools provided by the shipping company to create a shipping label and stick it on the box, and then wait around for the mail guy to come and pick up your packages, etc, etc. What happens when you start getting 30-40 or more orders per day? You either have to do all of this busy work yourself or you hire people to do it for you. Not only this, but you need to actually store your products somewhere and provide a place for your employees to work and package your products.

What if there was another way? What if you didn’t even need an office or employees to do all of this work for you? If you fulfill your orders with Shipwire you don’t need an office or employees to spend 8 hours per day packing items. Shipwire will do the most labour intensive part of your job, as well as store your inventory for you. All this, and at very reasonable rates.

With Shopify’s new Shipwire support you get integration with Shipwire’s order fulfillment, and real-time inventory services. Now all you have to do to ship your order is click a single button in the Shopify admin interface. Now that sounds like a dream to me.

A dream indeed. Great job Shopify!

Every time it snows here in Portland, I’m amazed at the lack of capability the city has dealing with the environmental change. Nobody can drive in it (although we all seem to manage out at Mt. Hood just fine), nearly all businesses shut down and the highways turn to parking lots with only a few inches on the ground. Down in Texas, you expect that sort of reaction since it’s, you know, Texas — but I think they’ve got nearly the same amount of salt & sand trucks down there as they do here.

Since “every time it snows” is really “maybe once a year”, it makes logical sense that the city doesn’t have a ton of infrastructure to deal with it — it sure was a shock the first time around though.

I’ve got to walk downtown this afternoon so hopefully it’ll stay light and fluffy, avoiding turning to rain like currently predicted. I’ve got Benoît Pioulard’s Précis currently playing; with the view, it’s a great atmosphere to get some work done.

Do you look back fondly on a time when the majority of email clients didn’t support CSS? Do you long for table-based layouts to be the only legitimate method you can ensure your message appears properly in everybody’s browser?

Have no fear. Microsoft, with their upcoming release of Outlook 2007, has transformed the email client from quirky but manageable with the IE6 rendering engine, to a giant thorn in my side, since 2007 will now use the Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine.

Just a few of the luxuries we’ve been enjoying that will fast be methods of the past, seeing as Outlook has an estimated 70–80% of the corporate email market:

• no CSS background images
• no CSS positioning (this is iffy enough that I hardly used it anyways)
• incredibly poor support for margin & padding
• wonky support for nested div’s and things as simple as background colors set via CSS
• no animated GIFs

Apparently this is all being done under the ruse of security — even though IE7 is supposed to be the most secure version ever?

Check out the full list of what Outlook/Word 2007 supports straight from the horse’s mouth.

Thanks to SitePoint and David Greiner at Campaign Monitor for the disappointment and ruining my weekend. :)

It’s time for an overhaul around here; completely new visuals, better navigation, and a rethink on what type(s) of content I’m going to put up here. The 40+ drafts I’ve got saved in Wordpress are deleted, it’s time to start fresh.

For the time being (mostly because I can’t stand this look any longer), I’m switching over to Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme while I develop version two of this site.

If you’ve stuck around this long through the silence, I implore you to stay around a little while longer!