Surgeon General’s Warning: May contain traces of reality. This is flash fiction.

On a long Saturday afternoon, I found myself wandering around Galeries de la Capitale in a state of semi-consciousness.

By state of semi-consciousness, I mean a state at which you are aware you are not conscious but not much else, or one where you seem to be mindlessly navigating like a somnambulist across a crowded mall, without knowing if you’re headed in the right direction, or not aware if there even is a right direction. I’m still amazed I didn’t bump into anyone.

To outsiders, it must have seemed pretty strange. An average-looking guy with Asianesque traits, trembling and soaked in his own sweat, wandering around an awkward hybrid of a mall and amusement park. Some might even say it was a disgusting sight. But I didn’t care because I wasn’t even there.

While I was being led around by my subconscious, several questions entered my mind. Not things like “why did I push myself so far that I lost consciousness?” or “will this have an impact on my brain for the future?”, those only came later as I came to.

No. These questions were about the urges and desires I had suppressed. “Does Em like me?” “Why have I been suppressing these feelings I’ve had for her for so long?” “Will I regret living the rest of my life this way?”

All valid questions. All of which I don’t have answers for.

That means that there is no way for people who bought Super Monkey Ball to get a deal on Super Monkey Ball 2. That left Sega with two choices: 1) release it as an update, meaning anyone who bought Super Monkey Ball would get it for free; or 2) release it as aseparate app, meaning that anyone who bought v. 1 has to pay full price for v. 2. The App Store does not give them any other choice.

We saw this recently with Tweetie 2, but there is a significant difference: Tweetie 1 was $3 (and worked fine, well worth the price, so no buyer’s remorse there). Tweetie 2 is only $3. Super Monkey Ball was $10. Super Monkey Ball 2 is $10 (well, $9.99). Given my experience with Super Monkey Ball, would I risk another $10 on Super Monkey Ball 2?

Excuse me. Super Monkey Ball 2 is not a revision to Super Monkey Ball, it’s a whole new game. A sequel.

Can you say it’s unfair for Sega to ship a game with tacky controls and never fix it? Sure you can. Their response should have been a bug fix update to the original Super Monkey Ball if it was a bug. Though, it might just be the people who are playing it are incompetent; many seem to ignore that possibility.

But in no way am I delusional enough to claim Sega should give people who bought the “broken” original a free copy of the sequel. That’s just stupid.

For the last two weeks, Google Wave has been an active part of student life for CS students. By that I mean, Wave is always open and we are always conversing. It’s the same backchannel talk you’d expect from students, except substitute whispering for typing.

But there are some things lacking with Wave I’d like to address:

• Wave is still very crashy. Depending on the days, Wave will crash 0-50 times per hour. That is not hyperbole.
• Google Contacts is a mess. Let me organize my friends in groups, and give me actually visible privacy controls for deciding who can/cannot spontaneously invite themselves onto my friends list.
• Oh, and while you’re at it, let me invite groups of people into a Wave at once.
• For those curious, the tipping point of Wave crashiness is when a Wave gets to around 200-250 pings. It gets worse with the number of gadgets people throw in there.
• Multiple selection checkboxes are absent. I’d like to be able to grab 15ish Waves (of 100-300 pings each), unfollow them, and send them to a folder without it taking something like 5 minutes.
• Lack of native clients. I get it, web apps are cool. But I prefer native in most cases, and it wouldn’t hurt, especially on the iPhone. Your “mobile client” is slow even on my iMac in the iPhone sim, how do you expect it to run decently on a real device? Seriously.
• And of course, lack of federation on the main server. If you’re going to be a federated standard, there is no excuse for the main server not to be either. (This goes hand in hand with the last point, as there are clients for wavesandbox.com and other federated servers out there.)

Gut reaction to this headline:

Churuya: “Kyon-kun! Kyon-kun!”
Churuya: “There’s a howto on reverting to the stable version of Flash Player.”
Kyon: “Stable Flash is an oxymoron.”
Churuya: “nyoro~n”

You said you’d be mine 3600 seconds an hour every day
Which in milliseconds that’s 43,200 times 10 to the 3rd

So my friend Benjamin and I have a thing for Les Horribles Cernettes. And we stumbled across one of their live concerts on YouTube in class the other day. So that’s what I’m watching right now, and Liquid Nitrogen is the geekiest breakup song I have ever heard.

Seriously. It’s awesome. Go read the lyrics, and if you dare, go listen to the full track (in all its mid-90s MIDI synthesizer flare).

Here’s something I despise about this semester in college: Léa.

As I have blogged before, Léa is the new redundant portal whatchamacallit our college has introduced this semester. Teachers love it because they can amend our assignments at any time.

I’m not necessarily opposed to “amending assignments at any time”. What I am opposed to is inconsistency and having the constant need to check another bucket.

I have an email account. I check it a few times throughout the day. I have a Google Reader account. I try to check it once a day. I have a Twitter account. I catch up on the latest posts whenever I get an Internet connection throughout the day.

Léa introduces three buckets.

The first is “class notices”, which are at the “Class” hierarchy level. Each member of a certain class sees these under the header of the class. (These are the notices I have blogged about previously.)

The second is the personal messenger, the equivalent to the private messaging on your typical forum. This is the only bucket of the three that actually has email notifications as a feature.

The third is your grades, where some teachers will simply add comments to, either because they’re not used to the new system or it directly pertains to your grade on a certain assignment.

If I hook up the personal messenger to my email, that’s two additional buckets I need to keep up with every day, because teachers expect you to have seen everything that was posted there, regardless of what time it was posted at. There are no cookies or long-term sessions for this. You need to log in every time. There are no notifiers or utilities to automatically check if you have new messages. It is a drag.

And every so often, it’ll be 10:30pm on a Sunday night and you’ll go and check your inbox only to see you’ve got a whole textbook chapter to read for 8am the next morning.

Goddamnit.

This is a blatant derivative of the Quietube Auto-Redirect userscript; all I did was trim unneeded lines of code and change the URL it redirects to, so really, I shouldn’t be getting any credit for this.

This userscript redirects you directly to the YouTube HTML5 Viewer I linked earlier, as well as replaces any links on any page you’re on with links directly to the HTML5 viewer, saving you an extra redirect.

In case you haven’t noticed by now, I despise Flash. I’ve been waiting for YouTube to roll out an HTML5 version for a while now, and the only thing they’ve been able to come up with is this tech preview.

Not good enough.

NeoSmart Technologies seems to have implemented their own HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos, and this means a large chunk of my Flash consumption will go down. All I need now is something like this for Nico Nico Douga.

Thanks to pumpkin for linking this on Twitter.

Lots of really great tips for Objective-C programmers; some of which I really need to start abiding by myself. Worth a read if you’re doing any sort of OS X or iPhone development.