Those kids and their Wiis

I remember back to the late 80’s when I would play Super Mario Bros. with my friends. The one defining aspect of playing that game back then was that I would try to make Mario jump by jerking my controller up in the air. Of course this didn’t do anything, but it was just a natural reaction to playing the game. My mom did the same thing for years.

Fast-forward to today. My 7-year-old is just starting to learn to play video games. For the past few months, she’s enjoyed (or been frustrated by) games like Mario Kart Wii and other games where motion (such as jerking the controller up in the air) gives her the response she wants. Playing the Wii has been a bit unnerving for me, as I spent years of my childhood trying to unlearn the very sorts of actions that the Wii encourages. This has always come naturally to her.

A few days ago, I decided that it was time for her to learn how to play with my Nintendo DS. As the was playing “The New Super Mario Bros.,” I noticed that the motion that she’d become accustomed to (jerking the controller around) wasn’t working, and it was making her frustrated. When playing Mario Kart DS, she kept trying to turn her driver by turning the DS in the air… which, of course, doesn’t work. All in all, playing the DS was a frustrating experience for her after having played the Wii for so long.

After seeing her frustration playing those action-oriented games, I decided to let her try another game that I thought might hold her attention longer: Final Fantasy. Specifically, it was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Gameboy Advance. (FFA for PlayStation is still one of my favorite FF games.) I handed her the DS and let her play, warning her that there was a lot of reading involved, but that it might be more interesting for her. She started playing and I didn’t hear anything out of her for over 4 hours. Simply amazing. Her cousin came over yesterday, and they’ve been playing a LOT of Nintendo DS together.

So I suppose it was interesting to see the difference between her generation and mine. Or rather, the similarities. The biggest difference is that this time around, Nintendo allows people to jerk the controller around. I also think it’s interesting that my daughter couldn’t pay attention to the Mario games, but was able to hyper-focus when it came to playing an RPG. That sounds like my daughter.

25 random things about me

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. All through Elementary, Jr. High, and High School, my teachers would always tell my parents: “Ryan is a bright kid, but he just doesn’t apply himself.” In 6th grade, I was the only kid in G.A.T.E. with an F as a class grade.
2. My first real girlfriend was a girl named Claire, who was really cool. The first time she met my mom was on the way to Taco Bell, and Claire called her “Mom.” My mom still asks me about her from time to time, although Claire and I haven’t spoken since high school.
3. When I was a kid, my mom didn’t want me listening to “Devil’s music,” so I was only able to choose between opera, easy listening, or country. I chose country. I listened to country exclusively until mid-way through my Freshman year of high school when I went to Eric’s house after school. His brother Kevin and cousin Sebastian were listening to a little blue-covered CD with 4 guys standing there with the name “Weezer” along the top. That was the day I became a fan of Alternative.
4. In 1995, my best friends (Eric & Jeff) and I decided to start calling ourselves the U.F.K.S. (which stands for something that starts with “ugly” and ends with “suckers”). It was an inside joke about an inside joke that was satirized by the class clown. Over time it just became UFKS, and doesn’t really stand for anything anymore.
5. My sophomore year in high school, I wrote a story about my then-girlfriend and I breaking up for my English class. I wrote it in a writing binge that started at 9:00pm and went until I finished editing the story around 4:30am. I listened to “The Change” by Garth Brooks on repeat the entire night. I turned the paper in and got an A+. I turned the same paper in in 11th grade and got an A+. Same thing in 12th grade, and again in my first year of college.
6. I met my wife, Sarah, in 11th grade Chemistry class. I gave her a wedgie, she gave me her pager number. True story.
7. I asked the same girl (my long-distance, on-again-off-again romantic interest) to both my Junior and Senior proms. Both times she said yes. Both times she backed out after I’d bought the tickets.
8. When my best friends (Eric & Jeff) graduated from high school, I ran down to the field after the ceremony and wrapped them both in duct tape just for kicks. When I graduated from high school a week later, Eric and Jeff wrapped me and my girlfriend Sarah in duct tape.
9. One of the best things about college was that you didn’t *actually* have to go to class. I used this privilege liberally, and ended up failing all of my classes. Unfortunately, I also did the same thing the following semester, and again the semester after that. I ended up deciding to join the seminary instead. I dropped out of that too.
10. I spent a few months in 2000-2001 in the San Francisco rave scene making candy bracelets and dancing to trance and house music in underground clubs getting hit on by both girls and guys. I met some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met during that phase of my life.
11. Once I was at a party, and had unknowingly taken a hallucinogen. It’s one thing to be young and stupid and decide to get high with your friends. It’s another matter all-together when you find yourself having a conversation with a 6-foot lizard-person with a rainbow for hair, or when you’re talking to someone and suddenly their face morphs into a completely different person, or when you shout “go carpet, go!” and actually mean it.
12. When I was 21, I asked my girlfriend Sarah to marry me. She said yes. A few weeks later Sarah said that she thought she was pregnant. I woke up the next morning and found our roommate, Rick, snorting a line of some blend of speed off the coffee table. Sarah and I packed up and moved back to Morgan Hill that very same day. My little girl changed my entire life.
13. I told one of my best friends that I was going to go back to college and graduate valedictorian. He scoffed at me and didn’t believe I’d even finish. In 2003, I graduated with a B.A. in Design and Visualization with a 3.84 GPA.
14. My daughter, Julianna Grace, was born at the end of 2001. I came up with the name 3 years earlier when I was working at Berean Christian Bookstore in Fresno, CA. Sarah loved the name, so our conversation about what to name The Girl literally lasted all of about 2 minutes.
15. I’ve founded two open-source software projects: SimplePie has now had hundreds of thousands of downloads worldwide, and is considered one of the best pieces of software in its class. Tarzan reached a stable release in November 2008, and has already become a very popular piece of software for leveraging Amazon.com’s pay-as-you-go internet infrastructure services.
16. My son, Matthew Taylor, was born in 2005. His name consists of both my own middle name, and the middle name of Eric — one of my two best friends. We also kicked around Daniel (Jeff’s middle name), but preferred the sound of Matthew instead.
17. In 2006, I co-founded a company with the goal of solving the digital media problem. People were downloading music and movies for free on the internet, and the Media Industry was crying foul. Meanwhile the Media Industry was unsuccessfully trying to apply the old “Content is King” mentality to the internet, and were treating their customers like criminals. WarpShare was born out of our efforts, and will be launching in the next few months.
18. I have an INFJ personality type, which less than 1% of all people on Earth have. – http://bit.ly/SSeR & http://bit.ly/Rt5Y
19. I’ve moved roughly 25 times in my life. 19 of those times have been since Kindergarten. 9 have been since I graduated from High School.
20. I am a very pattern-driven person: I always keep a pen, chapstick, and my keys in one pocket, and my wallet in the other. I only take off my shoes in one of two or three places. I have a left-foot sock and a right-foot sock.
21. I hate wasting my life away. If I’m going to spend part of my life doing something, then I want it to be something I can be proud of. There only a few things I hate more than having to work on a project where I’m not able to make enough of a difference to be able to be proud of what I’ve worked on.
22. If relationships aren’t intense, they’re not worthwhile. Although I have friends, my closest friends are people that I’ve been able to be emotionally close to (as I’m sure is the same for everyone). If I can’t have that, then they’re just people who are in my orbit who I cross paths with from time to time. If you’re not in my daily orbit, call me, because I’ll only occasionally remember to call you.
23. Because I’m able to to do my hobby as a job (usually), I find that I struggle with workaholism. When I’m working on something interesting and my brain is firing on all cylinders, I can zone out for several hours at a time before realizing how much time has passed.
24. I Tivo every single episode of Scrubs that comes on throughout the course of the day, and on most nights I fall asleep watching it.
25. For about a year and a half (May 2007 – November 2008), I was the lead male vocalist for a band called “The 5-Afters.” Mary, Sandy and Ingrid were the lead female vocalists, Nick was our acoustic guitarist, Mike was our electric guitarist, Dave P. was our drummer, Tina was our percussionist, “Guitar David” was our bassist, and Dave K. was our sound guy. I had a lot of fun with those guys, and I’ve missed them terribly since I moved away this past fall.
26. (Bonus) I’ve suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder since I was 16. I’ve never taken any medication for it, but simply understanding *why* I get depressed in the winter (and, conversely, why I have so much energy in the summer) enables me to make adjustments in my life when I start feeling depressed or anxious for no good reason. A by-product of this is “reverse photosensitivity” in that I frequently have all of the lights on when I’m home, my home office desk is in front of a window, and I have a difficult time working in the current WarpShare office (which has no windows).

I already tagged several people on Facebook, so I’m only going to tag a few more here: Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, Michael Shipley, Matt Clower, Vada Dean, Ron Bronson, and Christen Dybenko (whom I’ve not met in person, but should seeing as how we live relatively nearby each other).

Loving my new iPhone 3G!

Recently, I became the owner of a shiny new black, 16GB iPhone 3G. I’ve had a BlackBerry Pearl (8100) for the past 2 years, and the iPhone is a significantly better device for me. Here’s why.

For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year. I ended up having to install the Google sync app on my BlackBerry and move my iCal calendars into Google Calendar, then re-import them with Google’s CalDAV support. A messy solution at best, and it still doesn’t solve the issue with my contacts.

iPhone 3G, however, syncs with my Mac flawlessly (as expected). Because I have a MobileMe account, my contacts and calendars sync within minutes (faster if I force a push). On top of that, I have all of my email accounts routed through Gmail, so the mail client’s IMAP support makes configuring and managing my email simple.

Beyond that, there are all of the custom apps that are available now that the iPhone OS 2.0 software went live. The apps I find myself using most (besides Contacts, Calendar, Phone, Safari, and iPod) are Brightkite, NetNewsWire, Things touch, Twitterrific, Apple Remote, Klick, TV Forecast, 1Password, Facebook, YPmobile, and nearly a dozen time-wasting games. I’ve even created a ringtone from the Dr. Horrible theme song.

All-in-all, I’m happy with the phone. The on-screen keyboard responds and auto-corrects as quickly as I can type, which makes typing MUCH faster than it was on my BlackBerry. The only irritation I have is that I can’t tether it to my MacBook Pro as a 3G modem without jail-breaking it. This is more due to AT&T’s policies than anything else. The only other thing is that I haven’t found the right setting yet in Handbrake or VisualHub to convert my DVDs into a format that works with both my Playstation 3 AND my iPhone at the same time. Let me know if you find the right combination of settings.

I give it five stars, over and over again.