I recently stumbled across an interesting device on the internets, it has to do with one of my favorite puzzles of all time, the Rubik’s Cube (or Büvös Kocka, “Magic Cube” as they call it in Hungary). What is it, you ask? It’s an electronic version of the original puzzle. “Electronic version!”, I thought, “it must have a timer LCD on it, and maybe it even scrambles itself!”. Indeed, I was wrong. I sat there, in shock, as the original Rubik’s cube was being defaced, and even mocked by this abomination of a toy. It’s called “Rubik’s Revolution!”, which is basically a completely different, much easier game that looks like a Rubik’s cube. Is it challenging? Maybe if you find pushing buttons challenging, the goal of the game is much like those “Spider Stomp” games at arcades. Pretty simple, press the button if the light is on.

What does this have to do with Rubik’s cubes, you ask? NOTHING. Is this what American kids have come to? Simplifying this “impossible” puzzle by making an unchallenging, light flashing, button pressing game? I think even the Odyssey’s Chase game was harder than this.

Of course, a WOMAN was behind this ridiculous monstrosity. Even worse, it’s a celebrity. None other than Vanessa Hudgens, a star of some high school musical aptly named, “High School Musical”, which is most likely centered around the love tales of two very obtuse reggies. See a video here of her talking about how she started a “revolution”! Even more worse, she calls it an ‘improvement’ on the ‘old’ Rubik’s Cube.

Anyway, if you’re smart enough, you can buy a real Rubik’s cube and laugh while seeing morons trying to press those lights as fast as possible!

I was looking at the new iPhone commercials today, and I noticed that once again, the website chosen for demonstration of Safari on the iPhone was The New York Times’s website. I assumed that Apple chose the NY Times’ website because their pages have a decent amount of content on them with a mix of images as well. For some reason after watching the commercials, I had an urge to go to the NY Times’ website just to see what it’s like. First of all, I am a Safari user, I love Safari. As a web programmer/designer, I really appreciate Safari’s compliance with web standards. But I visited nytimes.com, the website looked like crap in Safari! Below is a picture:

As you can see, we’ve got all sorts of ugly stuff going on here. Content spilling off the right side of the container, broken images for some reason, misaligned columns, and not to mention, a non-fluid type layout.

This is so strange considering the iPhone is supposedly running “real OSX” and a real build of Safari! Here’s a picture of the iPhone displaying the NYTimes’ website:

Even in the ‘long’ mode it looks great!

Is Apple trying to tell us that Safari on the iPhone is actually better than Safari on the mac? What’s going on here!

Well, I have had a handful of bad experiences with Microsoft lately. I just recieved a new (pretty darn cool!) motherboard for Christmas; I plan on installing OSX with it, but first I decided to install some flavour of Windows first so I can do some hard drive operations to prepare for OSX. So the first thing I did was try to install Windows XP. No go, it doesn’t recognize the new hardware I have (no EIDE support). Well, I don’t have any floppy disks to install the drivers with, so I figured I’d just go to Vista now and try it out. After I finally found a working torrent, I installed it expecting Microsoft’s new operating system to behave a bit more like OSX and not worry about drivers.

Boy was I wrong!

I booted up and many things didn’t work. I was stuck at 800×600, I had no Aero Glass, I had no sound, and it was painfully slow! Way to go Vista! Looks like we’ll have to wait for the next release of Windows to see pain-free installation. So I started to fish around for drivers, using IE7 which came with Vista. I kept using the built in search feature to look around for a video driver, I couldn’t find a single page about NVidia Vista drivers. I was getting worried, but then I realized, I’M USING WINDOWS LIVE. So I searched Google instead and the 3RD RESULT was exactly what I was looking for. Way to go again, Microsoft. So after I finally fished around for my video card drivers and mysteriously enabled Aero Glass, then downloaded the (beta) sound drivers, I had a working system… kinda. I think it’s my RAM, I’m not sure, but Vista still seems sluggish. I mean, the glass effects are running fine (although making me a bit nauseous after a while), it’s just sluggish. So I thought while I’m waiting for OSX86 to finish, I’ll try to install Steam. It installed alright, and I got all of my games in a jiffy, started up HL2 Episode 1 to play around. It took FIVE MINUTES just to get to the “New Game, Load Game” screen. I was pulling my hair out by now, noticing that obviously something is wrong. After another ten minutes or so, I was finally in the game, except it was lagging horribly, unplayable. There were graphic artifacts all over the place, glitches every frame.

Bah! Well, I’m sure I’ll fix it eventually, but it really irks me that the newest version of Windows (RTM, mind you) still can’t compete with the simplicity and “just works” feeling of Mac OS X, and I’m left with so many more problems.