If you go to the App Store on your iPhone to read reviews, about 99% of negative reviews are like the following:

“WTF? Shud be free!”
“A BUCK FOR THIS???”

First off, what are you people? Twelve?

Second, it makes the reviews and star ratings worthless. It’s conceivable that for a $1 or $2 program that these reviewers did actually buy the program, but I’m betting that most price bitchers have not actually used the programs that they’re whining about. If you see the reviews for a $20 program that reads, “OMGWTFBBQTOOMUCH$$$,” do you think the reviewers actually bought it? Of course not. They’re just bitching for the sake of bitching. Does it work as advertised? What did you like about it? What didn’t you like about it (besides the price, you commie).

This is what happened to my friend Stuart Montgomery’s FortuneBall. The first reviews, and the only negative ones, are from these morons who are only complaining about the price. The app’s a neat little demonstration of the accelerometer, and it’s ONLY TWO DOLLARS.

Two dollars. They’re whining about two dollars. See, I think there’s a huge problem with the iPhone 3G launch — They did it over the summer. If Apple released it during the school year, these entitled little shits would be studying for their trig exam instead of trolling reviews of all apps that have something else besides “FREE” as the cost. If you’re a parent of one of these punks you need to 1) Slap them once in a while 2) Make sure they’re working on their summer reading list, because they obviously aren’t right now 3) Buy them another Che shirt to shut them up.

I love open source software as much as the next guy. Hell, I owe my whole career to OSS. This, is just ridiculous, though. No, not everything should be free. If you want it to be free, download the SDK and make a competitor. Don’t you think that’s more constructive than spending your time “LOLDISUX” all day at the iTunes store?

Here’s a little secret for all those wanting to be Californian. Do you know why this picture is hilarious and true? No, it’s not the comments about the other parts of the U.S. It’s the fact that the creator put “(awesome)” underneath “California.” That’s what makes this such a Californian creation. It’s such a CA thing to do. There lies the humor. Bravo, sir, bravo.

w00T!

If you live in Monmouth County, New Jersey, you undoubtedly have heard Basil T’s campy and moderately annoying radio commercials. It’s a dining establishment here with its own brewery on location. The reputation, I gathered from several people, was good beer, mediocre food.

Wow, mediocre is quite the understatement. Basil T’s ranks up there with really bad dining experiences I’ve had in New Jersey, and believe me, there’s plenty of crappy food here. Most bad places in this area are cheap like Cobblestone Diner, the never-mourned Olde Towne Buffet. Basil T’s manages to be crappy and expensive, thereby taking the crown of the Worst Restaurant Ever.

We went there on Friday night. It’s the usual trendy, classless, house-flipping, American-Idol watching, new money crowd. We had a margherita pizza, beet salad, broccoli rabe pasta, one beer, and a Coke. The mozzarella on the pizza was sparse. The whole thing was overcooked, which nuked whatever flavor the cheese had. Domino’s is better than that Frisbee was. At least Domino’s puts cheese on their “pizzas.” The pasta was way too firm - probably undercooked. The service wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t remarkable. The beer was ok, but certainly not worth the journey. Total price? $80 frakkin’ dollars! For bland, awful, weirdly-textured food! And those cheapskates had the nerve to charge me for the refill on the Coke!

If you have $80 to blow and you’re looking for anything tastier than food at Basil T’s let me suggest the following:

• 80 Tacos at Taco Bell on 36 in Eatontown
• 15 Sandwiches made by an angry Hispanic lady who will mess up your order at the Red Bank Wawa
• 8 bags of tree bark from the Lowe’s on 35 in Eatontown

So, in summary, Basil T’s is awful, and they totally ripped me off.

There is a special place in Hell for anyone that has ever had anything to do with getting inkjet printers to market.

Inkjets are the biggest ripoffs ever. The technology has never changed since they were first released - a bunch of crappy nozzles spewing ink all over a piece of paper. Sure, they’re cheap. That’s the only draw. The only problem is they never last. If the nozzle doesn’t get clogged, the rollers will jack up, or in the case of HP, their internal counter hits a number and it stops working automatically, even if it’s mechanically fine. The idea is to make up the low hardware cost through ridiculously high margin ink sales, but third party ink sellers undercut this plan. They have to make up for it by making shitty hardware that forces people to buy new printers every few years. It is planned obsolescence run amok.

My Canon Pixma MP780 died last week. The main black cartridge is completely clogged. It was less than three years old. The story’s the same - works great for a while, then it gets wonky. You have to clean the head more often. You usually have to print at the highest quality to get a printout without white lines. Then one of the stupid nozzles stops working all together. An inkjet printer never lasts more than three years for me.

Tired of the same stupid nozzle game, I looked into a color laser multifunction. They’re in the $600 range these days, and I woudn’t have to change the ink as often. I calculated out the cost of inkjet equivalents plus the high price, low capacity ink cartridges, and came to the realization I probably spent a total of $500 for the Pixma and ink these past three years anyway.

I found the Samsung CLX-6200. It had everything I wanted: color, laser, duplex, Macintosh support, and wasn’t a Dell, HP, Epson, or Lexmark. Bonus was the toner it uses is cheaper than other color lasers. I found it for an an awesome price at thenerds.net and they had $5 shipping this weekend, too. I feared that the deal was too good to be true - a retailer that’s $50 less than their closest competitor with practically free shipping. I imagined a scenario where they wouldn’t ship it for two weeks, I’d have to get the credit card company involved, etc. Luckily, I was wrong. They shipped it on Monday, and I got the thing yesterday. I set it up last night.

It’s amazingly awesome! I had feared that the Mac drivers would be crippled and give me nothing more than print and scan, but I was wrong. The drivers rock and administration is done with cross-platform Java. It’s got ethernet, so my main computer doesn’t have to be on anymore. I can scan through ethernet from Photoshop. Print speed is great, even with duplex. I can scan to a USB drive or email a TIFF or PDF to myself directly from the machine. This is my weighted companion cube!

So, in a nutshell, Shu Chow gives a big thumbs up to the Samsung CLX-6200, buy it from thenerds.net, and inkjet printers are pure evil.

Ibby’s Falafel is on Grove Street in Jersey City. They make the best falafel ever. I go there at least once a week for lunch, including a three-week streak once. Imagine my surprise when, driving through downtown Freehold today, I saw this:

My first thought was to take a picture so I can show the Jersey City guys so they can sue the Hell out of these imposters. You can’t just be any sort of Joe Schmoe and throw “Ibby’s” and “Falafel” on a store sign. Ibby’s in JC is a landmark.

Instead, we took the more rational approach, parked the car, and went in. I was going to get to the bottom of this. I immediately saw a couple of people behind the counter that I recognized from the downtown Jersey City. Turns out the family has lived in Freehold for twenty years and finally decided to open one locally. Sweet awesomeness, now there’s an Ibby’s 20 minutes away from us.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/20/obama_supports_fisa_legislatio.html

Obama Supports FISA Legislation, Angering Left
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) today announced his support for a sweeping intelligence surveillance law that has been heavily denounced by the liberal activists who have fueled the financial engines of his presidential campaign.

Codifying wiretapping is not the problem with FISA. If you’re pissed about that, you should have been pissed when all those court decisions that chipped away at the Fourth Amendment were being handed down. Granting telecom immunity, though, is pure treason. All you Dems were duped by Obama. Barry Obama - flip-flopping bullshit you can delude yourself to believe in.

Shu: $100 worth of Dockers stuff at Sears and you get a $75 Shell gas card
Shu: Oh crap it’s over. Sorry
Jack: eh, what do I care?
Shu: When you go on your road trips, is the car magically powered by your bastardly aura?
Jack: yes it is
Shu: And are you somehow morally opposed to pants?
Jack: yes I am
Shu: neither surprises me

Shu: hey did you ever play Portal?
Jed: fuck portal
Shu: Fuck you Jed
Jed: ha ha how do you like me now
Shu: Portal was awesome
Shu: There’s a very small chance we’ll get a corgi puppy. I’m going to name her GLaDOS
Jed: good grief is that some sort of portal reference?
Shu: Yes, dammit, Jed. Just play it
Jed: fuck that racket, I don’t need to be one of those nerds who gets lightheaded thinking about a fucking box with hearts in t
Jed: I swear, internet nerds will buy anything

I have never played World of Warcraft. It came out when I started writing the first book. Then the second book started shortly after that. I never even bothered to upgrade my computer because all I needed it for was code and Word. Things changed in January when I got the Mac Pro. I installed an XP partition and went to catch up on the last three years and the sequels that they never port to the Mac. Here’s a quick review of everything:

• Max Payne 2: Pretty good. Nothing new, but the story is engaging and Bullet Time never gets old.
• Star Wars Battlefront 2: It’s ok. I played the first one to death. I played this one about twice through, but hit a wall.
• Call of Duty 2: Sucked. This is when I first realized in my 3 year absence that there was a trend to make it pretty hard to die in first person shooters. No health management any more. You just unrealistically regenerate.
• Crysis: Awesome to the max. Another can’t die/regen, but it’s awesome.
• Portal: More awesome. I was skeptical because it’s a puzzle game, but it’s original, quirky, and sarcastic. Everyone must play this game.
• Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow: Sucked. The original Splinter Cell was so new. The second one is nothing new. You play 90% of this game in night vision goggles (green and black) which gets really annoying really quick. About 1/3 of the way in, I realized I was only playing for the story.
• Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory: Sucked/Ok. I only played this to complete the triology. The game play was slightly better than PT. What really sucked is that the ultimate goal is not have to kill anyone. Why bother, with those guns, then?

Next up on the to-do list: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, BioShock, and Legos Star Wars 2: The Original Triology

Edit: Ugh. KOTOR2 sucks. What a waste of time.

I’m still twelve units and six months away from finishing at Rutgers, but I have narrowed down my post-school activities to the following:

1) Build lots of robots.
2) Do more advanced Calculus and statistics: multivariable stuff, more regression, master linear algebra.
3) Get really fluent in German once and for all.
4) Write book #3.
5) Get better at music theory and the guitar. Start a band named The Murdered Ravers with Colin.

Edit: Nora is helping me gather opinions by running this as a poll on her site. Thanks, Nora!