…I had the tremendous good fortune of marrying a beautiful, resourceful (and, one should also point out, charmingly tenacious) lady engineer that has made my life a whole lot more interesting and fun than I could ever have imagined (and then some).

I still wonder (every now and then) why she puts up with me.

I think it may be time to start considering early retirement or a change of scenery, given that today was the second time I’ve spent a night in hospital in two years.

Even considering that they cannot find anything physically wrong with me (yet), there’s surely lots to fix, and my lifestyle (or, rather, my work style) is in need of another serious overhaul¹.

Me, I blame it all on stress. Or the telco industry. Or little green men from Alpha Centauri. Or, quite simply, on my trying to do too much at once and not getting enough rest.

Still, there’s nothing like coming back home and see the kid’s face light up upon seeing me. Now that’s important.

—

¹ Last time I lost 20Kg over a year, moved to Marketing and started cutting down on overtime. I suppose this time I’ll take up fishing or something. ↩

This weekend I established a new personal record – that of returning a machine within mere hours of purchasing it.

As it happened, the MSI Wind is now available here in Portugal as the Tsunami Moover T10, and it popped up on FNAC this weekend.

It has a pretty decent Portuguese keyboard (with disappointingly small cursor keys), comes with a 160GB HD, and there are a bazillion hackintosh enthusiasts that swear by it, so I thought “what the hell” and brought one home¹ only to discover that the touchpad on it is absolutely atrocious.

For some reason, the thing is shipped with a Sentellic touchpad and Synaptics drivers pre-loaded, which doesn’t work out very well. To worsen things, the importer/integrator sticks a “made in Portugal” sticker onto it, which makes me wonder why they haven’t fixed this before the machines reached the stores.

But even if you dig around and find and install the Sentellic drivers (a feat unto itself) to tweak the touchpad settings, you’ll soon find that there is no drag scroll – the thing scrolls by tapping the corners of the touchpad, not by dragging your finger – like pretty much ever single touchpad I ever used on a laptop.

The UK forums are crawling with complaints regarding the Advent 4211 (same machine, different name), so it wasn’t hard to confirm that there were other issues with the touchpad.

Which was a shame. The machine is small and light (only a couple of centimeters larger than the Acer Aspire One) and there were a few nice touches (for instance, the restore software is shipped in an SD card instead of on a CD), but there was no way I was going to use a machine with such a poor touchpad.

Which, again, reinforces my resolve to stick to Macs as much as possible – there is absolutely no way Apple would ever turn out a machine with such a shoddy component.

I ended up exchanging it for another Eee 901. Despite my extensive criticism of its rather shameful keyboard, I have been using a 701 for months now, and with my previous gifts of a couple to family, will surely be able to find a home for it if something better comes along.

Like, say, those new Macs that are supposedly due in a few days or so.

And I will surely write up a review on it – my Dad brought me his on Thursday to have a look at (XP seems to be misbehaving), so I have two to fiddle with for a few days.

—

¹ No, I haven’t quite gotten over netbooks yet. These things are getting insidiously popular, and no matter how much you think you don’t really need one, the truth is that there is entirely too much going on in this space for anyone related to tech to dismiss it out of hand… ↩

A heads up for all of you subscribing to this site’s feeds – the URLs have changed from feeds.feedburner.com to feedproxy.google.com (something that was meant to happen for a good while now due to the FeedBurner acquisition by Google, but which I only had the opportunity to trigger last weekend).

Google places a redirect for those of you who already used the FeedBurner URL, but I still get a whopping amount of requests for the ancient PhpWiki RSS URL (yes, even after a couple of years), and although I still have a redirect there, it’s going to go away soon.

Getting to the point, please re-subscribe using the new feed URL ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s necessary.

Here are the links:

• Full site feed
• Blog-only feed
• Photo feed (I’ll be tweaking this one to improve upon the stock MobileMe feed).

Almost a year after the Open Handset Alliance announcements. Looks good, but also looks unfinished (as in a bit more unfinished than the iPhone, for those of you who might think I’m biased). The real challenge will be, as many have pointed out, getting a very strong brand behind the device (yes, there’s T-Mobile’s, but is that enough?).

Update: No standard headphone jack (uses a proprietary USB-like connector) and no ActiveSync (but appears to sync with Google services). Not for me, then, even if it does have MMS (and cut&paste…). Maybe one day, when I don’t need Exchange that badly.

Given that today was the last day of my vacation, I did the usual (somewhat depressing) quick run through the List Of Stuff I Really Wanted To Do But Couldn’t, and came up with one thing that has been smack in the middle of it for a good while, which is to catch up on games.

To give you an idea of how that went, I picked up Mario Kart just before on vacation, but only managed to play it once.

Besides the waste of a perfectly good plastic steering wheel, I think that puts me squarely on the “casual gamer” category – an interesting situation considering that a few years back I would spend an hour every now and then pulling off near-impossible stunts inside some high-octane variant of Quake, and enjoying every microsecond of it.

These days things are a bit different, of course, and I follow with mild bemusement the travails of those foolish few who are trying to get Spore running on their machines.

A moment of silence, please, for those who still think DRM provides a good user experience in software. Thank you.

Not that I spent much time perusing that kind of news – to draw a coarse parallel, I buy and read EDGE with mostly the same mindset I pick up WIRED (i.e., to build my own mental picture of what the industry is like and where it’s heading), but I haven’t the time or the patience to, say, read Kotaku or any other games site.

So yes, PC gaming is pretty much dead for me (please, no jokes about Mac gaming being dead for years now…).

Over the years I’ve found that console gaming is a much cleaner affair¹, if only because it doesn’t clutter up your computer with junk or make you feel depressed because your hardware clearly isn’t up to the task of rendering some specular highlight on the slime blob you’re attempting to guide/raise/educate/exterminate².

Which is a rather roundabout way to get to some of my actual points in writing this.

I’ve become a sort of console gamer, if spirit if not in heart – for I clearly do not spend much time (if any) in front of a TV set playing, and yet I now find it a lot more enjoyable than trying to play anything on a computer³.

There are now two active (i.e., plugged in and not gathering dust) consoles in the house: A Wii for “social” gaming and a few specific games and a 60GB PS3 that, truth be told, is mostly used as a DVD player and media center, hooked up to the “good” (1080i, HD) TV.

The 60GB PS3 is amazing in many regards, and I’ve downloaded every free PS3 demo I can find on their online store, but besides the bundled titles that came with it (so good that I’ve already forgotten about them), I only bought one game for it so far, and that is The Orange Box.

And, truth be told, I bought it because of TF2 and the illusion that I would actually play it every now and then.

I ended up fooling around with Portal for a bit and occasionally slotting in a PS2 disc or two (like Okami, which is still around somewhere), because I can’t find any compelling games for the PS3. PS3 games tend to be big hulking pieces of overwrought scenery and ambiance that require massive chunks of time that I don’t have.

I’d love to be able to play, say, MGS4 for the sheer fun of figuring out the culture behind the game, but it isn’t likely to happen soon.

Whereas I go out and buy Nintendo stuff pretty much sight unseen because it’s guaranteed to be fun, simple to play and hence more than enough as far as getting my money’s worth is concerned.

But Metroid can be played piecemeal on a Wii and is good FPS fun (if I feel like shooting things), and Super Mario Galaxy is simply magical and tremendously fun. Pure, unadulterated, enchanted fun.

I don’t care if it’s a kid’s game – it pushes the right buttons for me as far as spatial awareness is concerned⁴, and is easier to play in chunks than most games (there is no pressure to play the whole thing in a row, and so I have been playing something like a galaxy per month).

You would think that something smaller and portable might be a bit more my style, but I have (since forever) found mobile phone games to be a waste of time, and my PSP has been gathering dust since I got an iPod Touch.

And, oddly enough, besides the amazing Trism (one of the first apps I bought) I have played zero games on the iPhone or iPod.

So much for the “funnest” and most hyped gaming platform of the year, then – although the AppStore is compelling enough on its own for me to spend a while every weekend window-shopping, which is an order of magnitude more than Sony or Nintendo have managed to get from me (now that I think of it, I haven’t visited the Wii one for months now).

Looking forward, Little Big Planet and Mirror’s Edge are on my radar for the PS3, if only because they stand out from the plethora of machine gun and chainsaw games for the platform. I very much doubt I’ll go out and get either on my own, but I will surely add them to my wishlist around Xmas.

And I’m intrigued by the potential of both Sony’s and Nintendo’s online stores. Neither seems to be very dynamic these days, but I have hope.

On the online front, I should probably point out that the recently launched Life with PlayStation is nothing to write home about. I personally found it somewhat insulting to not even have Lisbon on the map, for instance (whereas Nintendo can give me the weather for a bunch of Portuguese cities, if I ever feel so inclined as to actually check it on a console).

Still, it bears reaffirming that whatever kind of online strategy Sony and Nintendo have, it’s not really happening yet.

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¹ Provided you are willing to pay for your games, which I understand makes me something of a rarity in this day and age. I have mint copies of several widely-pirated games from my college years, something that many friends of mine thought hilarious at the time. ↩

² Pick one or more. ↩

³ Although I remain steadfast in my assertion that the only real way to play FPS games is with a mouse and keyboard. Jiggling little sticks to try to aim a virtual weapon at a fast-moving target is preposterously inadequate when you spent years honing your hand-eye coordination to the point where you could hit a specific pixel on the target while you both were doing somersaults in mid-air. ↩

⁴ Yes, I need to keep exercising those clumps of neurons that gave me the edge in Q3. You never know when I might need to use them. ↩