I know Apple said it wasn’t revolutionary, and indeed, it isn’t but it does have a lot of nice little touches. One I particularly like is the fact that Exposé now shows minimised windows.

In this screenshot, you can barely see it, but there is a small dividing line – windows below the line are actually minimised. This is a nice touch, as I have a habit of minimising things and then forgetting that they are there.

Tomorrow sees the opening of the 29th Summer Olympiad in China. It also sees Flickr attempt another social experiment, encouraging users to take a snapshot of life on 8-8-08.

Despite having some sympathies to the commericalism of Flickr, I still have a pro account and will be taking part (even though it is open to free accounts too).

No doubt Flickr and Yahoo will be hoping for many photos from China, and the rules for Flickr 888 basically give them the right to sell your photos for profit if they want to. Tomorrow my life won’t be as interesting but I’ve been spending the past week trying to spot potential photographs, and while I know one shot I’m intending to take, I have no inspiration for the rest of them. I’m going to have the camera with me all day, so I’ll see what comes out.

I am an existing, very happy iPhone customer, having bought one on the afternoon the original was launched last November. It is truly a fantastic device (calling it a ‘phone’ does not really do justice to it, but it is not really a ‘smartphone’ either – despite being branded as one). When the 3G model was announced, I put my name down for further information, but was not too impressed with the features – I was waiting to see what O2 would offer existing customers.

The truth is that all existing customers of O2 get is the ability to end their 18 month tie-in to start a new 18-month contract. The cost of the phone is the same for new and upgrading customers.

Based on this, I decided it was not worth upgrading. I was perfectly happy with my iPhone, and while 3G is nice, I’m happy to wait for the few websites I do visit on the phone to download over EDGE. 16 gigabytes of storage would be nice, but I’m reasonably frugal with what I put on my iPhone anyway – I’ve yet to fill it even with 341 songs, 831 photos and 18 videos (two of the videos being over 30 mins long).

Where Apple and O2 have really messed up is that once again they have underestimated demand. O2 stores have been given a small amount of the stock, and their online store is still not selling them after it crashed following the first hour of sales. Existing customers can only upgrade through O2, while Apple stores have the greater amount of stock.

The problem is that as you can only upgrade through O2 stores, you are forced down the route with the lower availability. This leads to O2 having to serve both new and existing customers. Once the stock is gone for new customers, then customers are redirected to the Apple shop.

This leads to the second biggest problem: the apple shop does not have the capacity to handle the amount of new customers with the in-store activation policy.

I visited there last night in order to make an enquiry about purchasing a new iMac, and all the advisors were busy activating iPhones and couldn’t help me. From a business perspective, what is more important to Apple – a £89 sale, or a £1,200 sale?

I appreciate that Apple and O2 want to cut down on the black market for iPhones, but I’m sure their advisors and managers would rather be spending their time serving customers as opposed to waiting for the O2 website to perform credit checks.

The original iPhone launch was incredibly smooth, mainly due to the fact that customers simply purchased their phone and activated at home. Granted, there were some people who encountered a problem activating on launch night, but the majority of customers were able to activate on the night, and within a couple of days those who couldn’t activate were sorted.

Unfortunately for Apple and O2, those people who were able to order a 3G iPhone on the internet have already put them up for sale on eBay, with prices currently around the £400 mark. While the in-store activation policy might have ensured more customers get tied into their contracts, those who always intended to put the phones on eBay have already done it, so has the in-store activation worked? ‘Honest’ customers (those who are activating in-store) were always intending to activate their phones, those who didn’t want to activate are still buying on the black market, and those Apple customers who have no real interest in buying the iPhone are being neglected in store.

Apple stores should go back to the core of the business, being computer and entertainment stores, and leave the mobile phone contract activations to the mobile phone stores.

This is a far cry from the reports of Mr. Zhu who was killed in real life when he ‘stole’ a virtual sword and sold it.

The same article linked above mentions that in 2003, the Internet Games section on eBay saw over £5m in transactions. Not all of this was for virtual assets, but there is no doubt that there are people daft enough to spend real money in a virtual economy.

As a World of Warcraft player, I’ve received in-game mail offering me virtual currency for my real-world cash. Some regard this practice of ‘gold farming’ cheating, others justify it by saying that because they work, they don’t get to spend as much time in-game as other people, and therefore need the virtual cash to spend on in game equipment just to keep up with their peers.

But what is the appeal of Second Life?

Part of the appeal would be the fact that you can create almost anything – from in-world art and clothing, to minigames. you can then sell these items on to other players for virtual money. However, in order to get the virtual money, you need to put in your real money.

Like a fruit machine, you get a sniff of some of the prizes for putting your money in, and you feel compelled to put more in. It can become an addiction.

I’m not saying that World of Warcrack is any different – I know people who are addicted to that game, and you do pay a £9 a month subscription to the online service. However, I believe that what you get for your money is far superior to any other online game. £9 a month is the equivalent of buying a new PC game every three months, which was average for me before I started playing the game. However, since buying the game, I’ve not bought a single PC game, and I’ve not been tempted to.

I’ve played Second Life, and in comparison, it is light-years behind WoW. It is slow, glitchy, and the avatars walk like the bizzare offspring of Kryten and Robocop. It is possible to walk and even fly(!) through the environment (and possible to fall through the world too). This is partly the problem in that the virtual environment is all user-created, wheras the Blizzard Empire employs hundreds of professional programmers to ensure that the floor is as solid as it can be.

SL is advertised as a life simulator (not disimilar to The Sims), and the appeal of adding your own user-created content to what is effectively an open-source world is appealing. However it is also time-consuming, and unless you have a super-powerful PC, it is slow…

However, like a rabid murloc, the media have jumped on the SL bandwagon, building it up and overhyping it. This leading to more people trying it, and the game world getting more cluttered and disorganised. The appeal of making money by ‘playing games’ is obvious, but the truth of the matter is, that aside from these few people who have made and spent a fortune in the game, the rest of the populace have not been as successful. But the end result is no matter how successful these virtual entrepreneurs have been, the only winner is the creator of the game, who has achieved more publicity than they ever thought possible, and are now actively encouraging real-world businesses to advertise in game. How much longer before SL becomes the equivalent of a 3D MySpace?

It could also be the fact that it doesn’t yet have a Mac Client that puts me off SL :p

For both dramatic, and character-arc reasons, Han Solo should have no problem killing a bounty hunter in cold blood. As an audience, we don’t know if Luke and Ben can really trust the man who has agreed to smuggle them to Alderaan, and when Han redeems himself at the end of the film, shooting Vader’s Tie Fighter and allowing Luke to destroy the death star, we have seen him turn from someone who only cares about saving himself, to saving his new friends.

Anyway, I digress…

The owner of the site contacted me, and asked me what cards I needed to complete my ‘A New Hope’ card collection – and has actually found and is sending me 9 of the 10 I needed!

So, many thanks, you’ve made a geek very happy

But the story doesn’t end there – in a subsequent post, I asked about the missing card list, and the Star Wars Fan Boi came up trumps again! The cards from the Premiere two-player introductory game are now listed over at his site! Just goes to show, sometimes a question asked without expecting a response can sometimes surprise you.

Although the game manual included a card list – it included the complete ‘Premiere’ card list, and highlighted the ones that were included. The only problem with this is that there were multiple copies of the same card included, and it doesn’t give you any idea of which!

The Decipher website (the makers of the game) only lists the ‘exclusive’ cards to that set (basic versions of Luke and Vader to get you started).

If any reader does have the definitive list, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a comment.

I am a Geek

There… I said it.

So, on what evidence do I claim my Geekhood?

Well, firstly I keep a blog… I work in IT… I spend some of my free time in a fantasy land called Azeroth as a Level 54 Elemental Spec Female Human Mage… I can also recite pretty much every line of “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”.

Back in the day, I used to collect CCGs. I still have a large collection of the Star Wars CCG, in fact, I’m only missing 20 cards from the ‘A New Hope’ set, and 100 from the ‘Premiere’ set.

I’ve looked into selling them recently – there must be over 600 cards, all in mint condition, hardly played and lovingly stored in protective sleeves (both individually, and also in two binders). However, fickle as this world is, they would not fetch anywhere near their value on eBay. However, when I open the folder to look at them, I simply cannot bring myself to part with them. Although I have no-one to play the game with me (Star Wars CCG is a two-player game, and both players need to have some experience playing to understand the mechanics) I still hold out the hope that one day I might use them again.

The Mage that I mentioned earlier… well, she is my main character in the MMORPG World Of Warcraft. I’m very much a casual player in the grand scheme of things – I’ve had the game since release day, and I still haven’t reached the level cap of ’60′. In fact, my total play time is still under two weeks (time spent actually playing the game). Compared to many people who actually play the game, that is miniscule. But anyway, it is through her that I have discovered a new CCG based on World Of Warcraft. At first glance it looks pretty similar to Magic (which is one I never really got into). However, the company producing it has come up with a rather novel way of generating hype. Although the game is not out until the end of the month, you can actually download and play with a set of sample cards. Printing them out, and placing them inside deck protectors (covering over other CCG cards, they can be played with as if they were any shop-bought cards).

I’m hoping to have a go with them over the weekend and see how the game plays, but if it is any good, I’m probably going to be attending a launch party.

Sad, I know… but I read this quote, which I think sums up my life: We do not stop playing because we grow old… We grow old because we stop playing.

Oh, and Han shoots first!