Imponderables Pondered

Bill Gates just won't give up. After I suggested that he would be going door to door to sell Windows Vista, I saw him touting the virtues of Windows Vista on the Daily Show (not quite - yes, Bill was a guest on the show and yes, he was there to sell his new OS, but no, he didn't say anything about why I should buy it).

I'm sorry I missed last week's post. Would you believe I was waiting for it to get warmer? Well, yesterday's high temperature was 1° F (-17° C) and as I'm writing this, the temperature here in Chicago is -15° F (-26° C) - so something has frozen over and I feel like hell which must mean that the Colts won the Superbowl. (How's that for a segue?)

I just started playing Final Fantasy III and while it's just about everything I could want in an RPG (and what I'd expect from a Final Fantasy title), the online component of the game is a joke. Here's the deal. Whenever a player goes into town to rest, buy supplies, etc., they also have the opportunity to send messages to characters they've met in the game. So far, so good. Additionally, you can send messages to people you have shared friend codes with and that's where things break down. First of all, the interface for composing your message is painfully awkward, with punctuation AND the space on a separate page from the letters. So you have to switch pages after each WORD to write a sentence. This would be understandable if they were short on space, but clearly there are many unused spaces on the letters screen where a space key and maybe a comma, period and question mark could be inserted. But that's not the only problem. See, both you and your friend need to have their friend codes entered in your respective games to send messages to each other. Simply sharing messages via wireless isn't enough to prove to the server that you two know each other. So I've got 3 friends on my friend's list and the computer says I can't send messages to any of them. Of course, with the stupid interface, why would I want to? Actually, there is a reason for that, but I'll get into it later.