Approximately 4 or 5 years ago I made what I considered a pretty major phone purchase. I replaced my existing cheap whatever this was with a shiny, new T-Mobile MDA. The HTC built MDA was an absolute monster of a phone compared to what I had before. It was Windows Mobile based, which meant I could install applications, browse the web, use SSH on it, even edit code and use Blender. I know functionality like this wasn't new to many people at the time, but it sure as hell was new to me. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of Windows Mobile, compared to the alternatives at the time (Blackberry, Palm, and other custom "bleh") it was pretty damned rocking.

Well, 4-5 years have passed, I've gone through two jobs, started my own business, and my faithful little phone has quickly aged and lost much of its usefulness. I long ago lost the desire to use it for anything other than phone calls. Its camera sucks compared to other digital cameras we have. No one supports my ancient tech any more, so new applications are few and far between. And the Windows Mobile environment seems to have somehow degraded over time such that it's always sluggish and often glitchy. I've had other friends who have had similar complaints about Windows Mobile in the past, but I really didn't start getting bothered by my phone until late in 2009.

So we decided to get a new phone, but, as I tend to do with everything, I really didn't want to get some stopgap solution that would hold me for a few months and then lose its usefulness due to it being obsoleted before I even get it. Thus, the question became, what do I want next?

So someone on Reddit posted this picture of a completely bizarre backpack today. General laughs were had at the strange juxtaposition of three seemingly diverse and different things: Barack Obama, Harry Potter, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Somewhere, down in the comments, kasim42784 made the following comment:

i am trying to tie harry potter, obama and sonic together but my brain is starting to hurt.

This was followed by user peroke saying:

I pray your post doesn't fall in the hands of slashfic writers.

Well, that sounded like a challenge to me, so I wrote the following (totally NSFW) tale:

• Barry, Harry, and the Speedy Hog: A story of pashion and erotica

I guess some people found it funny, so I share it here...

Anyway... I just got my new Google Nexus One and am currently in the process of setting it up. I'll post pictures and commentary on it a bit later on (after it charges and I can actually start using it).

Okay, so I've never been a fan of Apple. I always have disliked the Mac computers, even when they crammed Unix inside. I've never liked the interface, and have always found their devices cumbersome to use. I realize there are many out there who love Apple's products with the sort of rabid zeal generally reserved for fanboys, and, although I tend to generalize and say that all Apple users are mouth-breathing simpletons, I will admit that there are probably one or two Apple junkies who aren't.

At any rate, in the time leading up to this announcement about some sort of Apple tablet computer, it was the last thing on my mine. I didn't care about this news; partly because of my general ambivalence and malaise with regard to all things Apple, and partly because I pretty busy working on my own things.

But the announcement came, and went, and apparently a lot of people who were actually anticipating this latest Apple iTurd were pretty disappointed with it. Apparently people didn't want a jumbo-sized iPhone without a camera, any external connectors, or an actual phone in it.

Personally, looking at the pictures of Jobs standing there with this new monstrosity I find the entire thing very comical. To me, it looks like he's holding one of those novelty giant remote controls:

I just can't quite take him seriously with that thing in his hands. It's just entirely too ridiculous.

Well, someone made a Hitler rant about it, and it's pretty damned funny. Enjoy...

I've uploaded a few videos giving some early looks at the second game we're making at Funavision. However, I'm only posting them here on my site and not on the Funavision website. The reason for this is because Youtube kind of butchers the video from our game... and I'm yet to really figure out a way to prevent that.

See, our second game does a lot of stuff with moiré patterns, which unfortunately seem to be the first things to get obscured when Youtube starts optimizing videos for playback. The end result is video that doesn't exactly look like the actual game.

For absolute best effect, play these videos in the maximum HD setting and at full screen. Read on for the videos....

Okay, a few posts ago I mentioned that I really am enjoying Dragon Age: Origins. I posted many loving words about it calling it a "frighteningly rich and deep RPG with a tremendous amount of replay value". I also suggested it may very well "[usurp] Oblivion as my #2 most played RPG". Well... I may be ready to retract some of that praise and enthusiasm after what happened to me tonight....

This may be the most frivolous meaningful post I'll ever make...

When I was a kid, I fondly remember watching Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show with my dad. Carson's antics would always crack my dad up, and when my dad laughed everyone laughed. Carson's "Tonight Show" was one of a handful of "must watch" shows for me and my father which included Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, where my father would always make funny and inappropriate comments about whatever animal that was the subject of the episode, and The Carol Burnett Show. I can honestly say watching these shows with my father are some of my fondest memories of my early childhood.

As a teenager and later an adult I also grew to love Late Night with David Letterman, and it became a semi-nightly ritual to watch Carson followed by Letterman. When it came time for Carson to retire, I was anxious for Letterman to man the helm and subsequently pissed off when Leno took over. I'll admit that I stopped watching or caring about The Tonight Show at that point as I never really liked Leno's brand of humor and found him too often playing it safe, which I felt was a disservice to the legacy that Carson built up.

When Conan O'Brien took over Late Night, I'll admit I had an irrational prejudice against him because of the entire Leno/Letterman controversy. However, as the years went by, I found I was more and more interested in Conan's shtick than I had expected and eventually became a fan.

Insert obligatory apology about lack of updates here...

I have been rather busy, honestly. We have a patch done for Duologue that adds a saved game feature to it. This patch has been done for a couple of months now, but the XNA peer review process has issues. So, expect this patch soon-ish. You know, sometime in the next year or so depending on how many of these peer review cycles we need to go through :-)

I could rant about the problems with the XBLIG peer review process and XNA stuff in general, but I'm tired and entirely too busy to drum up enough outrage to write something on it.... How times have changed...

Instead, I'll just put some random ramblings about things that have been on my mind lately.

I saw an interesting post over in the XNA Forums about team based development and I decided to share some of my experiences doing exactly that at Funavision. As I was writing my reply it dawned on me that this is probably a significant stumbling block for a lot of start-up Indie game developers. So I've decided to make this post and share my experience with a broader audience.

In this post I'll cover what we've done for distributed development over at Funavision as well as give some tips and tricks we've picked up that will help you out. The focus will be on Version Control and Project Management tools with a strong emphasis on free (as in no cost) and Open Source tools. It will also be heavily skewed towards XNA and Windows development (largely because if you're, say, a Linux developer then you likely know most of this stuff :-)

The post will be linked from the XNA Forums. Hopefully that will get it around enough people who need it that word of mouth can then take over and the people who could actually use this information will be able to find it.

I do want to say that what we did at Funavision is by no means the end-all, be-all solution for working in a distributed team-based way. There are many different ways to accomplish what we've done, and many different technologies and techniques that can be used (both open-source and proprietary). All I can say is that this is how we've done it, and it's worked very well for us. If you're someone lost and looking for some options, then you certainly could do a lot worse than what I'll be describing. However, if you already have something that is working well for you then I'm not suggesting you should ditch it and try the solutions described here. Each to their own.

Just wanted to make a quick post updating everyone on Duologue's status, as well as explain why I fail at this whole web-logging thing.

First of all, Duologue is still in peer review. If you're an XNA community member then please come on over and help us out. We seemed to be stalled at around 85%, and need something to push us over the limit :-)

Second of all, damn this XNA review process is opaque. Apparently what's holding us up is the fact that we released a bunch of alternate language descriptions of the game. That triggered some extended review being needed from non-English speakers, which is to be expected. What was un-expected (to me, at least) was that there's just not that many non-English reviewers out there and, apparently, some languages are spotty at best in terms of reviewers. Unfortunately, because all I have on the project page is a tiny progress meter I have no clue what's causing our hang-up and thus can't address it specifically. All I can do is beg and plead for more people to drop by and test, hoping that one or more of them will count toward whatever missing ingredient the murky soup that is the XNA review process is needing. Very frustrating.