Friday, May 30, 2008

Wii Fit

For the first time ever I purchased a video game (if you can call it that) last week on the day it came out. While I have not been religiously devoted to Wii Fit since then, I do feel like it has staying power. The balance games are infuriating overall and I'm never quite sure I'm doing the exercises entirely correctly, but overall the workout is good and easy. Even the goofy "running in place" turns out to not be so goofy.

The key to Wii Fit is that it takes all of a minute or two to start "training." I just pull the Wii balance board out, turn on the Wii, navigate through a few menus, and off I go. Some people have expressed some frustration at the "navigating through a few menus" part. This is understandable, but I believe that choosing between workout allows for better pacing.

Wii Fit does not seem to come with a workout plan and users are mostly left on our own. There are a few "paired" exercises that I've found that work related muscle groups. The game tells you when you have done half of a pair and then tells you what the other exercise is. However, there is no daily/weekly/monthly program.

Although I have not unlocked everything yet, there are a few things I particularly like and don't like. The push-up/plank and jackknife exercises seem to be enough to work those muscle groups. The hula-hooping is surprisingly aerobic, at least for my current fitness state. As I mentioned earlier, some of the balance games are enfuriating.

Here are some interesting links:

http://www.nintendo.com/wiifit/launch/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_fit
http://www.veronicabelmont.com/2008/05/vii-fit-update/
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/wii-fit/

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Twitter problems

I am by no means a Twitter "power user" or anything close. I joined twitter because TWIT panels kept on talking about it. After finding a moderate number of interesting people to follow (and finding a moderate number of sites to not receive updates on because it feels like SPAM) I started to enjoy seeing what was going on.

However it appears that Twitter has grown a bit too big for its britches. I imagine part of this is just growth, and another part of it is the derby that Leo flagrantly promoted at the end of TWIT a week and a half ago. I have not listened to this week's TWIT yet, so maybe he talks more about it.

Twitter went down for me sometime late last week. The web page interface was working a little over the weekend, but I have not been able to connect through GTalk (my preferred method of connection right now). This morning I tried to fix GTalk, and then even the web portal went down.

Twitter is a really neat technology that will change the way web traffic games get played. However, it needs to be able to scale first. A lot of "stupid Twitter, but we still support it" posts already exist. This post just adds to the list. However, if a competitor (read: Pounce) captilized on this then Twitter would lose its competitive advantage of a head start.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Dissertation

Sorry for the lack of posts. I probably will not start seriously posting again until after my dissertation is done, so late August or early September. Of course, that is also when I'll be moving to Boston, so posting might get postponed further.