Back in high school, friends and classmates would tease me as being AB for Abnormal. During college and the first few years of work, friends and a colleague or two would tease me as being OT for Autistic. All done in jest, I’m sure. The teasing petered off as I settled down with work in the IT industry where AB and OT is the practical norm. Maybe people just grew up. Or maybe because I got more senior :P But once in a while, some people still tell me I’m insensitive. On a whim, I took this online test and I got a whooping 35! Maybe I should go see a specialist and know what gives. I just might find out I’m an aspie or autie. Boy, would I be glad!
Since I’ve recently decided to study iPhone programming and and since Starcraft II is still a few days away, I was able to spend some time learning Objective-C, the programming language of choice for iPhone development. Since, I’ve gone through quite a few programming languages (LOGO, BASIC, Pascal, C, some C++, Java, and more recently Flex), picking up the syntax and the basics was a relative breeze. I expect, as usual, things will get exciting once I start working with the iOS APIs. Haven’t felt this excited in a while!
Since I’m almost done with Red Dead Redemption on the PS3, I decided to finally get Starcraft II. Everything went smoothly at first. I logged on to the Blizzard store and picked a version. I decided on the US version since it is less expensive at around P2600 compared to P3600 for the Asian version. I paid and started downloading.
Then I hit a snag: Downloading the Blizzard Downloader was so slow using my Sun Wireless Broadband connection. After finally completing the download, the Blizzard download site won’t recognize the downloader as authorized anymore. I tried it several times with the same result.
I needed a faster connection. So now it looks like my US version savings is going down the drain. Since Globe’s unlimited surfing promo doesn’t work for postpaid, I borrowed Michelle’s phone, sent “SUPERSURF50” to 8888 and tried downloading again. Success! I was able to get the downloader and start the download of the game client.
After a few hours, I hit another snag: Globe SuperSurf “unlimited” surfing stops after you have downloaded 1GB of data. It not just slows your connection, it completely stops you from connecting. Fail! And you can’t even register for another day of SUPERSURF 50 because the previous one has to expire first! Double fail by Globe.
I guess it will be a few days before I can play.
Today, Manny Pacquiao will be fighting Antonio Margarito. Some people think that Pacquiao should just quit while he’s ahead. Now there’s something wrong with that. One, quit is not in the dictionary of a winner. Two, there is always someone, some place, some achievement ahead of you. So why quit when you can blaze trails and earn more, learn more, BE more? To paraphrase Thomas Edison: If you don’t fail, you’re not trying hard enough. Good luck Manny! Win or lose, you will always be a champion. But preferably win, of course.
UPDATE: Win he did!
The other day, Leslie told me about Swype for Symbian. Swype is an alternative input method for touchscreen devices where you swipe your finger from letter to letter onthe virtual keyboard without taking your finger off to spell a word. It’s all the rage in Android virtual keyboards.
Unfortunately, it’s only available for the Nokia 5230, 5800, N97, N97 Mini, X6, and C6-00. I tried it on Michelle’s 5800 and it was great. The nicest thing is that it provides a new keyboard for both portrait and landscape orientations. The new keyboards are way better-looking than the built-in keyboards. The portrait qwerty keyboard even shows the interface of the app you are working with instead of taking up the whole screen. As a bonus, regular key tap input still works.
UPDATE: Today, I found out it’s now available at the Ovi store for the N8. Does it fix one of the N8’s biggest problems? Not quite. The portrait qwerty keyboard is not available on the N8 version so you’re still stuck with the regular phone keypad. Still, you get Swype and that already quite an improvement.