Skeptics in the Freaky Museum

The one and only Skepchick, Rebecca Watson, is going to be in Philly this weekend. I’m going to go down and hang out with her and a bunch of other skeptics for the day. We’re going to get lunch (and drinks) at Eulogy, then head over to the Mutter Museum, for some serious mutant fetus action.

It’ll be a blast. Come on out!

Suckberry

When the iPhone came out last year, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Blackberry contingent that they wouldn’t give up their precious Crackberries with their hardware keyboards, and their jog dials. There were many people who tried an iPhone after being used to a Blackberry, and finding it difficult, pronounced it a failure.

Well, now I’m paying them back.

I’ve been using my iPhone since October and I’m pretty good at typing on it, even with one thumb. I’ve never touched a Blackberry before. But this week, I’m on call for work, which means I get to keep the Blackberry with me all week and if anything happens, log in to the server and restart it. It’s a stupid job, and we all have to take our turn doing it.

The so-called Crackberry has been in my possession for all of five hours now and here is my initial impression.

Let’s Get Physical

The device I have is an 8703e on Sprint. I’m not sure how old it is, so any comments about “yeah, well the new Blackberry does X, Y, and Z” are appropriate and welcome.

I’d call it a brick, but it’s not quite as big as the old Nokia Communicator I used to carry, so I’ll call it a hockey puck. There’s nothing subtle about the size.

They did a pretty good job of minimizing the number of buttons (other than the aforementioned QWERTY keyboard, which I’ll get to later). At my last job, we tested on a bunch of different Windows CE phones, and you could hardly pick one of those up without accidentally taking a picture of your hand and emailing it to your boss. The Blackberry has exactly five buttons around the edge: profile, power, mute, shuttle, and return. Not quite as minimalistic as the iPhone, but not too many accidental hits.

The plastic casing is interesting. On one hand it seems cheap and flimsy next to the glass and metal of the iPhone, but then again it feels sturdy enough, so I’ll call that a no-op.

Interface

They definitely designed the whole UI around the jog shuttle, as everyone knows. Even though I knew this, it took me a while to figure out how to do certain things, like move to different fields in an email. I sat there looking for a “tab” key or a directional joystick. Nope, just move the dial up and down. It’s the menu button as well as the “enter” or “choose this item” button. It really makes one-handed (even one-thumbed) operation pretty easy.

The actual look and feel of the interface, though, is pretty iffy. I was about to complain about the futuristicky font they chose, when I decided to see if I could change it. I sure can – to any of a dozen other futuristicky fonts, or comic sans. Bleh.

No consideration was made for text layout – half the time the text abuts right up against the edge of the screen (Note to UI designers: the problem with not having margins is that users will think that some text might be continuing off-screen. Always have margins.).

I could launch into an entire analysis of the GUI, but why bother? Does anyone think they use the screen anywhere near as effectively or beautifully as the iPhone? No? Didn’t think so. So let’s get to the keyboard.

The Keyboard

Before I had the iPhone, I had a series of Nokia phones (having worked for Nokia) and my favorite was definitely the 6820. The flip-out QWERTY keyboard was killer for doing SMS messages. The whole phone was perfect for that application. So I’m no stranger to hardware keyboards on phones.

The keys on the Blackberry are pretty good – distinct enough to find by feel, with a satisfying click. But, since it is a hardware keyboard, they have to pack all of the characters onto that fixed set of keys, cramming at least two characters on to each key cap, making it very confusing. But, I’m sure once you use it a few hours, it becomes easy.

Cursor movement.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I haven’t found any way to move the cursor to a spot in the middle of some text. Using the jog shuttle, you can move it up the right side, and then down the left, and that’s it. I was typing an email address in, and when I got to the end of it, I realized I had flubbed the first letter after the “@” sign. How do I change it? I had to just backspace all the way back and re-type the whole thing. There has to be a better way. Anyone? (Well, yeah, it’s call the iPhone, just poke your finger where you want the cursor. Done)

Summary

Overall, it’s a pretty good design, for its time (i.e. pre-iPhone). They had a good focus: an enterprise handheld that would do all kinds of messaging really well, with push email and web browsing, that can be operated with one hand, probably while driving.

I can see why people got addicted to these things – the feature set is there: email, web, SMS, etc. And the UI is, while not elegant, at least functional.

In this world of $199 3G iPhones with Exchange email and GPS, though, I wonder how long a shelf-life RIM has left.

Especially since the iPhone plays music and movies, too.

Gymtrakker

The process of software development is slow sometimes. Especially when the day job and taking care of the house get in the way.

Having said that, my progress on the Gymtrakker program could be much further along if I hadn’t hit the roadblocks I have.

The last time I wrote about this, I had figured out that the wireless surround speakers had been interfering with my wifi. Soon after I wrote that post, I upgraded my computers to Leopard, which broke my app in several interesting ways.

First of all, Leopard ships with PHP5 instead of PHP4. That took some figuring out.

Then, I realized that not even PHP5 is turned on by default. Easy enough to turn on.

Then I ran into the database problems. PHP5 on Leopard is not compiled with PostgreSQL support, only MySQL.

Which would be fine, since I had written the whole thing to be database-independent* and only had to do a few tweaks to the db interaction layer to fix the entire app, except that I wanted to move my Gymtrakker server to my G5 tower from my MacBook Pro and there was no pre-built binary of MySQL for PowerPC Macs running Leopard. So I built it myself using these instructions.

But it still didn’t work. And no one I know has been able to fix it, so I’m still figuring out what’s going wrong.

(NOTE: I originally drafted this post a few months ago, and still haven’t gotten back to figuring this out. Funny how life gets in the way.)

*I don’t like using the word “agnostic” when it comes to technology, because it’s inaccurate. The true meaning of “agnostic” means “something that we cannot know” from the greek “a” – “without” and “gnostic” – “knowledge”. When used in the religious sense, it truly means “we cannot know whether there is a god or not”. But it has been diluted to mean “I don’t care whether there is a god or not”, and hence in the technological sense, “I don’t care which technology we use.” I disagree with this use of the word, although I agree with the sentiment.

Italian Spiderman

Tobey Maguire is sooo 2007:

Click here if the embedding doesn’t work.

Busch Garden’s “SheiKra” – The Review

Let’s see if I can keep up the trend of reviewing thrill rides in the central Florida area. Probably not, but I least have this one to share.

Khrysti and I headed out the Tampa’s Busch Gardens Africa this Saturday, 1 to celebrate our anniversary, but more specifically 2, to finally Ride “SheiKra” which has been open for about 3 years now. But it’s all good, but it’s recently been “re-opened” with one new addition – make that 1 new subtraction – they’re removed the floor for the coaster trains. Woooooooo.

I learned waiting in line for about 15 minutes that early morning in ridiculously high temperatures that “SheiKra” is the name of an African hawk that has the habit of twisting in mid flight and taking sharp 90 degree plunges after its prey. I guess that’s why “SheiKra” the ride boost this awesome 200 foot drop of which half of said drop is 90 degrees!

Check out the vid below to see it in action:

After that, it does some twists and turns – that is if you notice after heading straight down and 70mph, then it does it one last time, but this time it’s a measly 138 foot drop. Then it swoops, turns, etc, then… well that’s it.

All in all, it’s be surprised if the ride lasted a minute. It’s quite short. Kind of a disappointment actually. Sure it’s got those 90 drops, but honestly, the trains are so firmly gripped to the track, there’s never a real feeling of free fall or danger. There’s just that constant sooth vibration of the steel coaster.

On major disappointment, and I’m sure it’s an engineering issue and I’m more than grateful to be safe than crashing face first into the ground, but it you’re not in the 1^st of three rows, the effect of hanging at the top momentarily before with first 90 degree drop is a bit lackluster. Unless they guy in front of your is wearing an unusually frightening hair piece, the chances of your heart racing and you screaming your lungs out before the drop are pretty slim.

All major complaining aside, it was a cool ride. Definitely not like anything I’ve been on before. It’s got elements of other things I’ve been on, but this was a few of them all rolled into one. But having said that, I’m also not eager to return and ride it again. That’s unfortunate too, because being a Florida resident the one day pass I bought Saturday is now good for the rest of the year. But with the price of gas being what it is, it’s really not worth the drive.

Now since that review was a tad shorter than the simpsons ride review (say by about 2000 words), I’m gonna pad out this review with some other events of the day trip:

Here’s a quick shot of “SheiKra” at the apex of its first loop:

“SheiKra’s” hill is slightly taller than this giraffe.

“It’s comin’ right at us!”

Got to take this shot as I got the Safari tour train. Not as awe inspiring as actually being on the group looking up.

Saw this guy on the Tiger Trial exhibit. It think that look is the Tiger equivalent of “piss off, I’m sleeping”.

One for icanhascheezburger”:

Funny little local information here: The Orangutan exhibit is closed. Why? Because on May 19^th one of them escaped! Busch Gardens is currently “redesigning” the habitat to prevent that from happening again.

News flash here Busch Gardens, maybe if you feed the Orangutan, it wouldn’t have had to escape!

And finally, by my wife’s request, here’s Khrysti cupping SheiKra’s nuts.

Oh yeah, my patented final rating.

Uh let’s see:
4/10
2/10
7.4/10
You can fill the categories, “it don’t matter. None of this matters.” – Carl Brutananadilewski

That’s all for now. Look for a new review sometime between tomorrow and 2018.