I’ve been an iPhone user since the price drop last year. No I wasn’t lined up at launch, I’m in a contract with work that I couldn’t get out of. But everything aligned with the price drop, and I can’t look back. I always had my iPhone jailbroken, just my nature I guess, so I’ve been playing games on it far before the app store was announced. I’ve had a fun time with Labyrinth but there hasn’t been a game I could say I really liked. Until Trism was released, of course.

Trism is available on the app store for $5, and I’ve probably logged a good 10 hours of play since purchasing it last week. The idea behind the game is simple, line up triangles on the board so you have three or more of the same color touching. In a sense, it’s very similar to Columns, Meteos, or even Dr. Mario. There’s the usual special blocks which pop up, a Rainbow if you get 5 matching triangles which can take the color of any block, a bomb which will end your game if you don’t destroy that block in the allotted number of steps, etc. This makes for a really fun, pick up and go game I can play while waiting for a chicken sandwich at the cafe, or for the wife to choose between the black shoes or the brown.

What’s unique about Trism is the use of the iPhone’s accelerometer to control gameplay. After you clear blocks, the holes that are left get filled in with other blocks nearby. You control which way the blocks slide by tilting the iPhone. That means you get to look like a fool flinging your phone around in public, which is always a good conversation starter.

There’s three different play modes in addition to the tutorials. The timed version throws bombs and locks if you take too long to get matches. The infinite version lets you play forever, so long as no bombs blow up. Finally the tilt version is more of a puzzle than a game, requiring you to tilt your iPhone to line up blocks in the least amount of moves. I usually play the timed version, it’s the most challenging for me.

My friend Sean Zimmerman is getting married in August. He’s a great guy, so I didn’t mind spending the money and time flying across the country for a weekend with the guys to celebrate. I can’t call it a bachelor party, since there were no strippers or over intoxication, but the spirit there. We all met up in Seattle for a few days, a city I’ve never visited but always wanted to.

In between a visit to the Space Needle and a viewing of Batman, we caught up with a Seattle Mariners game. Now, I’m not a baseball fan, so I really couldn’t care less about the game. I was just happy to have a beer with the guys, and they love baseball, so it worked out. I heard Safeco field had an agreement with Nintendo which lets you use the DS along with the game over their wireless. They used to charge fans $5 for this, but now it’s free and I was dying to check it out.

First off, you need to find a Nintendo station at the stadium to download the Nintendo Fan Network game. There’s one every 20 sections or so, flip open the DS and download it, couple minutes setup max. After you first launch the game, you need to pick a username and where you’re sitting. Then you’re connected to the network and can access all the features available.

The main menu has 6 sections you can explore:

• Food and Beverages - Order food to your seat, the single reason you need a DS. More on this later.
• Fan Network Audio and Video - Tune into the closed circuit tv for instant replays and listen to the play by play announcers, kinda cool but delayed a few seconds from the jumbotron.
• MLB Stats and Standings - As you’d expect, live stats and division standings. Probably great for those baseball fans without an iPhone.
• MLB in Action - I think this was the Pitch Tracking page, shows you approximately where the last pitch was in relation to the strike zone with related speed. Kinda cool.
• Fan Network Games - Things to do when you’re really bored, puzzles and crosswords, etc.
• Fan Network Messaging - The app with the most promise that sadly under delivers. More on this later as well.
• Log Out and your Profile - As you’d expect.

I’m sure if I were a hardcore baseball fan, I’d be loving this stuff. The fact that you can be at a baseball game and be immersed with baseball near and far is great. Extremely progressive compared to the days of buying a program and keeping score with a pencil like I did when growing up (yes I was a fan back then, Bash Brothers baby!).

The biggest selling point is the food ordering system. They have a fairly full menu of foods available to purchase; drinks, appetizers, entrees. You put in your credit card information, place your order, and within 5 minutes it’s delivered to your seat. The people sitting around me were all curious how it worked after a couple beers were magically delivered.

There’s a charge of 15% for the delivery, on top of the already crazy prices, so I can see this adding up fast. For 2 beers it was $18 compared to $15, a small price to avoid getting out of my seat and standing in line for who knows how long. It’s really amazing how smoothly this process went, literally 5 minutes from start to finish, cold beer in hand and I never left my seat. My friend Grant left a few minutes before I ordered, and we were halfway done with our beers before he got back.

Then there’s the Fan Network Messaging. You can see a list of everyone with a DS at the stadium, and send them messages. They get the message, and can reply. Sounds great right, a no brainer right? Well, it’s completely worthless.

There is no way to send customized messages to people you don’t already know, so you’re stuck with the canned messages they provide. “Great game isn’t it” - “Doesn’t that traffic suck” - “I love Nintendo” etc. Even if someone sends you a message, you have to respond in a canned message. “Yes, baseball is fun” - “I like the Mariners too” - “Agreed, the umpire is blind” etc.

The only way to send a custom message is by being someone’s “friend” and entering a code to confirm. Of course, you can’t send this code to anyone over the network, has to be face to face. But how do you meet up with someone you’ve never met? No clue. There’s no option to “friend me” through the system, or to send your seat location or anything. Sending a message with “Where are you sitting” gives the responses “In a green seat” or “In better seats than you” etc.

So we’ve got potential to make a cool, friend making system of like minded people, but it’s shackled. Only people who already know each other can really use it, and odds are good they’re sitting next to each other anyway, typing back and forth making fun of the friendless people. “Where are you sitting” - “Right next to you, hee hee”

Sure there’s kids here who might be offended or tricked into meeting up with some strangers, but you’d think they could figure out a way to make it work. Credit card authentication for age verification, something like that. They’re sitting on a gold mine here and they’re just rubbing up against it.

So if you’re heading up to Seattle anytime soon and get the chance to check out a Mariners game, make sure you bring your DS. The message system is a “swing and a miss” but the food ordering “knocks it our of the park” so to say. I can’t help but wonder how long it would take for them to web-base this stuff though, my iPhone could handle just about everything this offers and then some. Maybe at Cisco field…

Here’s a few more pics in case you were curious.

So I’ve been playing with the new search engine Cuil a bit. I’m not going to get into the user interface, which I think is pretty good but weird, rather the search results. I’m sure things are going to change, and this whole early release has some functionality missing, but the search is just plain wrong.

Take for example a search for Lawpower, my design site. I’ve worked hard to get #1 on google, even though the guys at Lawpower law firm have the .com and more good links. So I’m numbers 1, 3-9 on google as of this writing. the .com guys are number 2 and 10.

Now do the search on cuil. I’m in the top left corner, but my code site is listed above my main page. Where’s the lawyers with the .com? Nowhere to be found, in any results! How is that possible?

Another oddity, I’ve been working with my mom’s dance studio website to get her ranking better for “kids dance lessons” (11 at time of this writing, so close!). Course I wanted to see what that ranked on cuil, and it get an error saying that there were no results?

So for now, cuil is totally worthless for me. It’s a cool idea, I guess, but I don’t see why Google or any other search engine could change a theme and destroy them. I’ll try again in a week or so and see if anything happens.

I’m the proud owner on a Penryn Macbook Pro. I ordered mine the day they were released and have been using it as my primary machine for work and home since at least January-ish. Only a few weeks after using it, I started noticing some funky vertical stripes coming from the bottom of the display, kinda like every other LED decided to stay turned off. This usually happens when I wake it from sleep.

I did some research on this when it first happened and there wasn’t much online yet. Today there’s a few discussions about it. Since I’m about to head out for a long weekend, I decided to take it in to an Apple Store today to get it sorted out. I took that picture above this morning to show the genius, assuming it wouldn’t happen when I wanted it to.

When I showed the genius the photo and explained the problem, he knew all about it. According to him, it’s a known issue with some Penryn Macbook pros which Apple Engineering doesn’t have an answer for. They don’t know if it’s hardware, software, completely confused. He told me he’d take my computer and run some diagnostics if I wanted, replacing anything that failed, but that it probably wouldn’t fix the problem. Frustrating to say the least.

What he did recommend was a quick turn off and on of the display. This seems to do the trick most of the time. He showed me a key command I didn’t know of before to do this quickly. To turn off the display, hit Command - Option - Eject. Then once it’s off, hit any key to turn it back on, and you should be back in business.

While there’s no current fix for this issue, he told me to call applecare every so often and check if anything’s been resolved. In typical Apple style, if there’s a fix and it happens outside warranty, they’ll cover it. However, there’s no fix yet, so don’t hold your breath.

I’ve been pretty busy lately doing web development work as part of my daily job. When I started up again a few years back I had just some experience in html and photoshop. Now I’ve expanded to a good working knowledge of php, css and javascript, building some really cool apps I’ve actually deployed internally to high praise. Of course, you’ll never see these apps since they’re “confidential” but the underlying code took a lot of work, a lot of research, and I’m really proud of it.

So a few months ago I launched code.lawpower.net, a site designed around the spirit of sharing code. I’ve worked really hard to find stuff on the web that will allow me to do certain things on a website. I’m hoping that you’ll find some of my code useful, or maybe give you an idea to write even better code.

Each post is written in a problem/solution format. What problem was I facing which required some fresh code, and how did I come to a solution to solve it. I’ll always have a live demo available so you can see the code in action, as well as downloadable source code for you to play with. I think this is a great way for me to give back to the web community which I’ve borrowed so much code from.