Bars in San Antonio, TX

Texan II -- hell yes. Nobody gives a shit, they have a tap or two you like, the prices are right, and they love Fernet.

Bohanan's Bar -- nice and chill, just don't get the charcuterie, it's saltier than hell. Great place to start out the night with a beer and bar food. (They also have Fernet.)

Acenar -- grab a beer (or two) and a southwest salad here, to start the night off.

Esquire Tavern -- hit or miss. Sometimes it's full of hipsters and sales people trying to impress clients ... or other sales people. But it's a pretty good spot and the management is really wonderful. You just need to hit it on a slow, chill night. Also, they have Fernet, so plan accordingly.

The Local Bar -- okay sometimes this is good, sometimes not. They have Fernet and they know how to use it. It's full of genuine people who don't bother you if you don't feel like talking. But who will happily bother you if you're into it.

Tickets Sports Bar -- let's just put it this way. You got a chicken caesar salad, and the chicken was from a can. Yes, really. No. Really.

Drink -- overpriced and boring. Okay in a pinch, but not a place to spend the night. Also, the guy at the end of the bar is telling the bartender that it's "not fair that you dressed that way at <some place> and you don't here." Ick. Like, I'm starting to think I should slide a napkin across the bar with "do you need help" written on it. Oh god. Oh god, no. He manages the bar, and a bunch of others in town. Oh ick. Oh god, ick. Push the button.

Leapin' Lizard Pub -- how is this place still in business? It *should* be cool but it's awful. Especially the music. They must advertise in the magazines that hotels put in every room.

Drury Inn "NW Medical Center" -- San Antonio, TX

In case you've never stayed at a Drury, which you obviously hadn't when you booked it, this is basically the calibre of multi-story chain motel you'd expect to find lining the dicey, abandoned Airport Boulevard in Anytown, USA.  Checking in after ten PM, you're going to need to pass your ID and credit card through the bulletproof window tray, to register.

Due to the random car window smashing (nothing stolen necessarily, just broken) there are floodlights aimed at the parking lot.  Also, there are random piles of empty beer cans here and there in the lot.  But those lights have a broad spread, and come right through the windows of even the sixth floor.  On the bright side you can save some energy by not needing to turn on your room lights at all.  Save the earth.

And then there's the adversarial relationship with the restaurant that shares the same parking lot.  The front desk staff warn you that if you park in front of the restaurant you will be towed.  They're very clear about it, because apparently the restaurant does actually tow hotel guests if they park across the invisible line that delineates some petty dispute between restaurant and hotel managers.

Stay downtown and deal with a twenty minute commute, instead.

Killzone 3 for PS3

In a year full of pale sequels, I'm pleased to say this one's very good.  I played through the single-player story on wimpy mode.  The dialog is predictably "gritty," and it includes the usual storyline of the maverick soldier who refuses to leave his men behind .. but once you relax into the cheesemo, predictable "war hero"  stuff, it's kinda boy-game fun.

The multiplayer is where this one really shines.  Natch, you get the usual deathmatch mode, and the capture-the-flag style modes.  The "operations" mode is really fun tho; it's basically a mini-story where your team completes (or defends against) a progressive set of missions.  e.g. blow up the doors, take a strategic position, then destroy the mainframe.  (Should they update that to "destroy the 'cloud?'")

The other interesting thing about the multiplayer mode is that the choice of "careers" for your character doesn't seem to actually include a "heavy grunt" sort of character.  Everyone is specialized for something: heals, turrets, sniping, stealth &c.  The talent trees for each are quite short and narrow, and different maps are better for different careers.  It makes you try more than one career, and switch them up to match the map and your teammates' styles.  Well done!

Batman: Arkham Asylum for PS3

You see!? This is how you do a game based on a cartoon! The player  becomes the protagonist seamlessly, rather than just riding along on the hidden track of a jungle safari ride.  Plus, there's a real writer! Ryyyyyyye-tooooooor.  (Doesn't hurt that it's Paul Dini fer cryin' out loud.)  And who's playing the Joker? Mark Hamill.  Because he always does. It's an episode of Batman the Animated Series, it's just really complex, takes longer than the usual episode, and has a lot of side quests.

The fighting is great -- you're a badass, hand to hand.  But then your XP-based power-ups are things like the skill to drop down from a gargoyle and string up your opponents.  For kicks I did a level entirely by sneaking around the rafters and stringing the bad guys up when no one was looking.

Harley Quin went and turned into a sexy-schoolgirl cliché, but the rest of the characters have all the depth and intriguing-weirdness you expect, plus a little extra something that you can only really convey in an interactive medium where the player is discovering them as part of the story and game.

I haven't gotten all the way through yet, but when I do, I'm watching every last line of the credits.  There are gonna be names I'll recognize in future games.

Killzone 2 for PS3

Holy crap this game is intense. The intro movie sets the stage spectacularly, then launches you right into the action. Even in easy mode it's intense -- you survive longer, but it doesn't ratchet down the intensity at all. My eyes are still bleeding.

Visually, it's smooth and detailed. Your bullets don't just leave scars on the column that the bad guy is hiding behind -- you blow off pieces of concrete, all the way down to the rebar. And that piece of corrugated steel *you're* hiding behind gets knocked out of place with every grenade they land near it. You can see rockets coming at you smoothly, not stuttering between frames. The clear graphics give you time to side-step!

Then there's the AI stuff, which is remarkable. Enemies work together, shouting things to each other. They split up to flank you and they sneak around behind you when you hide. And this adaptability means that if you're failing a level, you can try a different approach and get totally different results. Blazing down the middle while mashing buttons not doing it? Sweep around the side, draw enemies out one by one, or just see whatever works in that particular area.

In any currency (six movie tickets, eight hours of iTunes, three blu-rays...) this title was definitely worth full price.

Resistance Two for PS3

Laundry's piling up, new mail goes on the stack, my running shoes gather dust ... everything must take a back seat to fighting aliens in Resistance 2. Foremost, because it's pretty -- the graphics are stunning. Part of the fight takes place in the redwoods of north california and you just keep getting ambushed because you're looking at the lush scenery.

It's also a technical masterpiece. There are parts where you're leading a dozen guys in running street battles. They manage to keep formation around you, they fall back when you fall back, and they subtly lead the way to the next checkpoint. (The bad guys are similarly smart.) The AI is really sophisticated; it's kinda eerie.

I'm not very good at shooters, but this one comes with a "casaul" difficulty setting that a slow-twitch guy like me can handle. And the save points are close enough together that I rarely have much of a walk when I repeatedly die at the hands of an angry squid.

I just sit back and enjoy the cheesy (but fun) story line, blast aliens, and run around the smooth, detailed scenery. I can't put it down! (Which is lucky for humanity, 'cause we’re *whey* outnumbered.) Pew-pew!

versionate.com

Wikis are really great for managing text, but they suck at managing proprietary formats of data. Natch, the purists would tell you to port the proprietary stuff to open formats, but you just can't get a wiki to sum a column of values, calculate the average and display both values along with the standard deviation.

So we all have these orphaned little word and excel files that we use for stuff that doesn't fit in the wiki. If you're organized, you and your cow orkers keep those files on a server somewhere, so you can all make changes and all have the most recent version of the files.

Enter versionate, who've souped-up the wiki's ability to deal with those orphaned files. You upload a word, excel or powerpoint file and they let everyone just view it right there in a browser. No viewers needed, it just renders it in html. And then get this, you can *edit* the files in a browser too!

So there you are in the datacenter on a borrowed computer that's got nothing more than a browser. You can still get to your team's excel file that you needed in order to find a spare IP or something. You can view it in the browser. And if you need to, you can update and it and save it back in the same format it was in.

It's really quite spiffy.

pownce.com

Everyone describes pownce as "the digg people's answer to twitter." And that's really what it is, a recreation of twitter-pioneered micro-blogging, but with the experience of having watched twitter evolve and scale ... plus with a couple of useful features integrated.

Natch, you post a few quick words about what you're up to and your friends get to see it on their own pownce page. Woohoo.

But then they've added the features that twitterites seem to've invented/popularized on their own. Any post can be designated a "Link" and your post will include a little chicklet to click and visit whatever site you're talking about. Designate a post as a "File" and you'll be able to upload about 10 Mb along with your text, that friends and fans can download with a click.

They've also formalized the twittermob, allowing you to designate your post as an "event." You can then specify a time and place that pertain to whatever you're posting. So in case your friends couldn't figure out what "beers at zeitgeist after work" means, they're now saved from the hobgoblin of ambiguity.

In short, it's a knock-off with a few informal "use cases" integrated as actual "features." So naturally, I hope that twitter catches up or does it differently or gets that magical "first mover" advantage and continues to survive as the "kleenex" of microblogging.

Unfortunately for twitter, pownce has something that twitter just hasn't bothered to build ... a desktop client that is full-featured, unobtrusive, aesthetically pleasing and written in-house. They use Adobe's AIR platform (flash on steroids and rebranded) to make it work on macs and pcs, and it really just works. It pains me to love it, but sheesh, have you ever tried to find a twitter desktop app that wasn't either totally busted or totally ugly? (Pocket Tweets doesn't count, that's hip-top.)

At lunch today, my cow orkers mentioned that Twitter just received a round of funding from some small players, and one of them is Marc Andreessen ... it'd suck for him if pownce turns out to be the Internet Explorer of microblogging.

shozu.com

In a nutshell, Shozu extends your camera phone's capabilities to save images or video directly to your favorite blogging and picture sharing sites. It'll send stuff you've previously saved on your phone, or it'll send something you just captured. They're currently able to send to blip.tv, buzznet, any email address, flickr, an ftp account, blogger, kodak, dada.net, livejournal, metaweblog, moblog.uk, picassa, pikeo, qipit, scoopt, textamerica, typepad, vox, webshots, wordpress and youtube. They don't seem to support social networking sites yet, like myspace, facebook, xanga and the like.

In short, it works just fine. Once configured, it's just a couple clicks on the phone to send your pictures and video to any site you like. Every new picture or video you make, it pops up a menu and offers to send it to your configured sites. There's even an automatic CC (as in carbon copy) function to always upload images to the sites you configure.

To me, though, it doesn't add much value. I've already got entries for flickr, radar, rabble, livejournal and others in my phone's contact list, so it's the same number of clicks for me to send pictures to any of those sites. Plus, shozu adds their own logo to every post they make on your behalf, and it's a pretty big one. MMS or emailing my pictures into a sharing site directly doesn't add anyone's logo to my posts.

The other nuisance is that I can no longer take several pictures in a row on this N75. After every picture, it tells me to open the flip phone so I can tell it whether or not I want to send the image to one of my configured sites.

For some folks, maybe road-warriors (claims adjusters?) or maybe teens or maybe grampa, this might be a really useful utility. Plus it's the only one I've seen that lets me upload to an ftp site, which could be turned into a very interesting sort of "webcam" application, showing my latest cameraphone picture on a web page, up to the minute. But for me, I'll be sticking to direct upload with the email/MMS gateways kept in my contact list.

Nice features; maybe they'll get bought for parts.

spriteyard.mobi

A couple weeks ago the mobile industry was all excited that Coca-Cola was actually going to try its hand at a mobile social networking community. So they created a Sprite-branded mobile community called The Yard. I think the name is supposed to refer to the fun place children get to go when they're not in class ... not the place prison inmates go to lift weights and shank rival gang members.

To gain access to the yard, you must text the word "yard" to 59666 (which spells "lymon") and they'll send you back a magical URL that you can access on yer phone. The site lets you upload pictures, and issue "shouts" to all of your friends. I didn't have any friends so I clicked the link to go find some.

You can search for new friends based on shared interests or location or "tag" ... and if you pick interests they give you a list of drop-down menu choices to cleanly cubby-hole yourself into a market researcher's matrix. For instance, one "interest" category is "How do you stay in touch with your friends" so you can find friends who share your desire to connect by phone, email, IM or smoke signal. I think that last one is to identify the stoners.

It's interesting to see a gigantic corporation dipping a toe in the water. The poor bastards gotta be terrified. Somewhere a marketing person is saying "how are we ever going to commercialize a medium where people just send things to each other directly, with no corporate supervision!? Think of the children!"

velvetpuffin.com

Velvet puffin is a desktop app that lets you log-in to all of your instant messaging accounts all at once. It's a *really* version 1.0 app. *All* it does is log you in to several messaging systems at once and connect to friends on your different systems ... whcih is what Trillian and others did back when they were verison 1.0. So it won't replace my own version 3-plus IM aggregator, but it does do plenty of nifty 1.0 things that people will dig. Casual users might really enjoy it.

It's a flash application, so it's cross-platform, but don't try to get it to do too much fancy work without leaking memory. On the other hand, AOL, Yahoo and Google are so insistent on bundling their way onto your desktop, the memory footprint isn't all that big a nuisance in comparison. Honestly, the choice between velvet puffin's memory usage and a client that pushes flashing banner ads at me all the time ... I might take the memory hog.

Sure, I uninstalled it pretty quickly, in favor of Trillian which I already use ... but I don't think I'm typical of web users. Velvet Puffin is incredibly easy to install and use, and I think that's important.

Perhaps they'll be bought-out for parts. The cross-system log-in, by itself, is a valuable function. They also have a reasonably solid webcam broadcasting tool, thanks to flash. The ability to share photos and videos with other users rounds out its features nicely. These are pretty useful parts.

Moo Cards

I'm in love with these people. They use the pictures that you select from your gallery on flickr or bebo or fotolog or vox or livejournal or views from your second life or habbo. Then they print 'em on the front of these cute little 28 x 70 mm cards. Then you tell them some text to put on the back of the card, mostly just something static but they also allow you to include basic variables like "the name of the picture" and stuff.

Twenty bucks gets you one hundred cards. I threw together a few pictures of the cat, some flowers, and a derby dolls bout for the front of the cards; then I threw some pithy text and the URL for my podcast on the back. I handed 'em out at work to everyone who came by my desk and people loved them. In fact, I had none left after *one* day.

I think I love it because it's just a nice, simple, versatile thing. You could make some really fun calling cards with this app ... or you could make a *killer* meme initialization vector. The cards make you crop your images so narrow that the viewer naturally wants to see what the rest of the photo looked like ... so you put a URL or text on the back that lets them see the rest of "the big picture" and it's irresistible!