Mike Flacy

I rarely post about politics, but something intriguing on the campaign front caught my eye today. A presidential candidate is advertising in Burnout Revenge. For those unfamiliar, Burnout Revenge is a car-racing video game owned by Electronic Arts.

It’s been about a week since I arrived in Los Angeles and I’m slowly starting to become acclimated to my new, frantic environment.  There’s a strange element of peaceful bliss about getting lost in the chaos of this city.  I’m getting a better idea of the city layout and have starting ditching the GPS just to see if I can find my way around the city.

All the grocery stores are completely different on this side of the country.  I’ve switched from the Publix, Bi-Lo, Ingles and Food Lions of the east coast to the Ralph’s, Vons, Trader Joes and Bristol Farms of the west coast.  The only constant was Whole Foods, but I’d have to sell a kidney to shop there on a regular basis.  Ralphs is the most similar to the east coast stores and there is a great one about a half mile away.  Definitely caters to the UCLA crowd.

I’ve taken some pictures that need to get up on Facebook and Flickr soon.  I’ll try to upload those this week.  I haven’t been keeping up with TV and iPhone apps lately, but I have really enjoyed the new Sunny in Philly

season.  It’s pretty incredible when a show can consistently stay hilarious season after season.  I’m also digging the new version of the Facebook app for the iPhone.  I can finally post to walls and return messages without logging into my computer.  Yay!

Digsby just keeps better and better.  They recently added LinkedIn support to the social networks.  I’m not interested in status updates so much, but it’s interesting to see the updates when people change their job.  Plus I never have to type in my log-in info anymore.

I don’t typically read Mark Cuban’s blog, but he made a great common sense post about building wealth this weekend.  There are too many people living beyond their financial means in this country.  I’d love to eat at Whole Foods and drink Starbucks everyday, but I don’t based on the same principles that he discussed.

So I moved again.  This time it’s Los Angeles.  I bought a new car (Mazda3 sedan) and started planning a trip across eight states to setup a new life in L.A.  I said my goodbyes, loaded up the new ride with my earthly possessions and started the road trip.

But before I left, I loaded up a few helpful road trip iPhone applications.  Travelocity was good for finding hotels near my GPS location.  Gasbag was excellent for finding the cheapest gas in the area.  Where was also decent for gas stations and Starbucks.  I relied on a separate GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions.  It was invaluable after stopping over in Memphis.

If you haven’t experienced Middle America before, there’s no better way to envelop yourself in the rural lifestyle than driving across the country.  It was a little disconcerting at times where driving across long, empty stretches of Texas and New Mexico, but still worth the experience.

Favorite Exit: Exit 237 in Oklahoma on Interstate 40W.  Do yourself a favor and stop at the Hungry Traveler.  The place is in a desolate part of Oklahoma, the epitome of the middle of nowhere.  I had a delicious mushroom and Swiss burger polished off with the best slice of blueberry pie that I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Favorite State: Arizona.  Perhaps it’s just the northern section, but the slow transition from rocky desert landscape to lush, green mountains is really quite breathtaking.  I stayed on Route 66 for one night after passing through Flagstaff.  It made me think of the Pixar film Cars.  (RIP Paul Newman.  He was awesome as the voice of the Doc.)  The gorgeous farmland of Oklahoma is in a close second.

Least Favorite State: North Texas.  The entire area smelled like cow manure from one end to the other.  My overnight stay in Amarillo was incredibly boring.

Favorite Overnight Stop: Memphis, TN.  I got to see some old friends and eat two delicious plates of sushi.

I made to L.A. after four days.  It didn’t rain one time during my trip.  I’m staying on Wilshire Blvd. near UCLA.  I might have lucked out with finding an excellent roommate and place to live on Craigslist.  Only time will tell.  It’s going to be interesting to see how well I can acclimate to the city.  It’s overwhelming and exhilarating all at the same time.

- Caught this little indie flick with Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega (the female lead in Spanglish). What a quirky little movie!  Freeman plays an out of work character actor that’s dropped off in an predominantly Hispanic neighborhood to study a grocery store manager for a role in a movie.  He latches onto Paz Vega, the girl running the 10 items or less line.

The whole movie is nothing more than a conversation that continues for about 90 minutes.  Freeman and Vega play off each other in a very human manner.  There are nice bits of comedy interspersed in the film as well.

- The Google / United Airline debacle was an extremely interesting technology screw-up this week.  Basically a single person accessed an article, around 1:30 A.M. last Sunday, about United declaring bankruptcy in 2002.  Since it’s a low traffic time for accessing news, Google bounced it to the Popular Stories section on the main Google News page.  Bloomburg picked up the story as new and the ensuing financial panic caused shareholders to sell a billion dollars worth of stock.  The price on the stock dropped by 75% in a matter of hours.  Yay computers!

- If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the political opening for SNL this week.  The remainder of the show is complete drivel, but the Sarah Palin / Hillary Clinton skit is absolutely hilarious.  Tina Fey nails Palin’s look, mannerisms and accent.

I watched the first episode of Dexter season 3 this week.  It doesn’t air for another two weeks on Showtime.  No story spoilers from me, but I will say that the ending will leave your jaw on the floor.

I was studying Jimmy Smits character the entire episode.  He has an odd interest in Dexter that I’d imagine is going to leak over into Dexter’s favorite pastime.  I think they both have a thirst for justice and Smits is going to take part a killing somewhere along the way.

I really didn’t care for the new guy in the detective unit, but the girl in Internal Affairs has my interest peaked.  I like the direction that they are taking with Batista’s character as well.  It’s going to cause a rift with Laguerta down the line.

The spontaneity angle is extremely intriguing.  I’m wondering if Dexter will develop a need for spontaneity rather than his deliberate planning stages.  It makes for sloppy work, but he seemed to have gotten a thrill over the whole mess.  Anyway, the first episode catapults several story lines into play.  I can’t wait to see how Dex handles them.

• I enjoyed the premiere of The Shield’s final season this week.  It was a slow start considering the pacing of the previous episode, but it laid some brilliant groundwork for future story lines.  I’m thinking Shane lives, Ronnie goes off the deep end, Vic and Acevada take down the Mexican cartel in a very bloody fashion and Dutch finally goes to jail for strangling neighborhood cats.

• Finding a new place to live on Craigslist has been disappointing to say the least.  Trying to make a long distance connection with a potential roommate is somewhat dampened by the anonymity of the Internet. Ugh…

• I had some of the worst sushi in my life today.  Japanese marinated mushrooms might sound tasty, but the ones I ate were the consistency of rubber and completely flavorless.  Yelp is going to get a mouthful of unhappy words from me this week.

• True Blood on HBO was an offbeat show.  It reminded me the feeling I got when watching Carnivale for the first time.  The oddball choice of setting in the deep south is strangely interesting.  I doubt it will make it past a couple seasons though.  Entourage was excellent as usual.  Eric looks a bit like a clone of Ari though.

• I’m really crossing my fingers for iPhone’s 2.1 firmware this week.  It’s rumored to be coming out with the new version of iTunes on the 9th.  I’d love to see turn-by-turn GPS implemented, but any other super secret iPhone powers will be welcome.

• My favorite Hulu video of the week: Taco bed!

Here’s a little blast from the past:

A couple years ago, I took a trip to NYC on my birthday to visit my sister. She moved to the city to begin a modeling career while I was in college and was working at Nobu on 57th at the time. She wanted to show me a good time and decided to take me to a place called Bungalow 8 down on 27th. I, being an oblivious kid from SC, had no idea what this place was all about. It’s fairly hideous in daylight:

It was an exclusive, ridiculously tiny, celeb-happy club that people literally had to purchase alcohol for an entire table. Her friend Matt got us right into the club and somehow we hooked up with someone that had purchased a table. We sat down and basically got to drink Grey Goose Vodka for free the entire night. I got a peek at the bill at the end of the night and it was somewhere in the $3000 to $4000 range!

So we are drinking and having a great time. The music is pumping so loud that I can barely hear my sister or Matt. Matt wants to get a picture of both of us in the club and I give him my camera. He takes a couple shots, but was rudely interrupted by a very large man telling him to stop taking pictures. I was wondering why he was being so confrontational about it.

Thankfully Matt slipped the camera back to me before anything happened to it. I asked Matt what had happened and he said that the big guy was Lindsey Lohan’s bodyguard. He didn’t want us taking pictures of her. We had no idea at the time, but I caught a glimpse of her in the photo later on. (It’s the one in my Flickr stream where I look like a complete drunken buffoon.)

The truly hilarious point in the night was when Matt screamed at me over the loud music something to the effect of “Why would we want a picture of drunken Lohan anyway?” He probably should have looked over his shoulder though. She was standing right beside us at that point and gave him a nasty look. I recall we left soon after.

I found Dan Hsu’s blog today.  It’s about his experiences as a gaming journalist at EGM.   Check out all three parts if you are interested in how advertising and pr folks influence coverage of the industry.

I was inspired to write a smidgen of a blog post about my limited experience with public relations influence over how games are reviewed.  VGT is a small fish compared to sites like IGN, Gamespot, and 1up, but our reviews warrant the same critical value on sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic.

In late April, I got an invite to a media event in San Diego for the Bourne Conspiracy game.  This entailed a $475 plane ticket, two night stay in the Hard Rock Hotel ($450), transportation to the event / airport and a party hosted by the development team with a open bar that dished out endless mojitos all night.

There were about twelve writers from other “small fish” sites that made the trip as well.  I wouldn’t be shocked if Sierra or High Moon Studios dished out $15,000 over the 3 days.  We got a brief tour of the studios and shuffled into the a couple rooms to get some hands on time with the game.

After the day trip, we were given some swag and shuffled back on the transport bus.  The group was told that we couldn’t report on anything that happened that day until after the game was released.  Our entire experience had essentially been embargoed until a point in time when a preview wouldn’t be newsworthy.  As I drifted off to sleep in my comfy Hard Rock Hotel king sized bed that night, I pondered what their actual intention was.

They wanted to dilute the overall review average by befriending the press that doesn’t get invited to these events.  I ended up giving the game 3.5 out of 5 stars, but the majority of the people at that event scored it 80% or higher.  I admit that I actually felt guilty about scoring the game on the lower end and pushed publication of the review for a couple weeks.

I certainly don’t regret going on this press junket.  It’s the type of event that the IGN’s of the world frequent constantly.  I met a couple cool writers and really appreciated the entertaining weekend trip, despite the plane ride.  It was also an enlightening look at how schmoozing can heavily influence the review process.  And somewhat disconcerting.

I was cleaning this weekend and came across one of my old high school yearbooks.  I’m not one to reminisce about high school on a regular basis, but it’s certainly handy for Facebook friend requests.  I can’t remember half the people that supposedly knew me back then.

While flipping through the pages, I came across a wilted, previously pink flower that I had kept.  I vaguely remember that a girl gave it to me, but I have no idea who it was.  I borrowed the idea from Gary Cooper’s character in Pride of the Yankees.  (Grew up on old black and white movies)  I find it utterly hilarious that I can remember the reasoning behind putting it in the yearbook, but can’t remember the person that gave it to me.

I’ve started to look at rentals in Santa Monica again.  Something close to the bus line when I need to go downtown.  Maybe Downtown too.  Craigslist is a myriad of options, but less actual solutions.  I’d really love to go somewhat car-less, but L.A. is such a car-centric town. Arrrgh!

I sat in a coffee shop today and browsed the music on a friend’s laptop. I browsed by albums for a while but eventually found Ben Folds new album by an artist search. I queued up the music and sat there listening to the tracks while sipping my Splenda-filled jolt of caffeine.

Of course all I had was my iPhone. The laptop in question was about 578 miles away.

I downloaded the Simplify Media iPhone app a couple days ago for free. (It’s free for the first 100K users and $3.99 afterward.) Install the SM app on your PC / Mac and it uses iTunes, Winamp or just directories to share music. Sync it up with your iPhone and you can listen to your entire music collection without having to transfer it to the iPhone. It streams the music through the net and the quality is superb. You can add up to 30 friends and share your entire music collection online.

It works great on the 3G network or Wi-fi. Don’t bother using it on Edge though. It also downloads album art, lyrics and artist info. One downside is that it takes a really long time to archive huge collections on the computer. If you have more than 5000 songs, go watch a movie while it indexes the music.  Simplify Media is also having some growing pains due to the massive popularity of the iTunes app as well.

I’m also starting to enjoy Stitcher.  It’s a neat app that organizes a ton of podcasts and broadcasts them in a radio format.  I don’t like the little ads at the bottom of the screen though.  It makes the app seem overly sluggish.  I’ll take a few more days with it before sending it to the App graveyard.

I loaded custom firmware on my PSP today, much to my own technical dismay. I tried using Gizmodo’s method, but it was complete crap.  I delved into the web and found other means. The PSP is easily the most useless of my portable devices.  Besides Skype, I really don’t use it for much else.  I’m going to try and download some interesting apps tomorrow.  Probably nothing as cool as the iPhone though.

I read an interesting article over at ReadWriteWeb yesterday about the release of Moveable Type 4.2.  Very cool information about combining social networks with the blogging platform.   The Action Streams are a self hosted version of Friendfeed or, to a lesser extent, Twitter.  BuddyPress also looks interesting but it’s still in development.

There is a lovely article about Twitter etiquette over at The Morning News.  I totally agree with the first rule.  I’ve been blocking Twitter spammers since the start.  Zero followers is better than 100 spammer followers.

I discovered TweetDeck yesterday.  The design is ridiculously productive, yet the web keyword feature can easily suck away hours of your life.  I watched the iPhone feed and started firing off helpful replies incessantly.  The outcome is another handful of Twitter followers.  It’s a fantastic tool to find Twitter users with similar interests.  It’s not bad for local connections, but Twinkle is still the king in that respect.

I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager.  It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish.  It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.

The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens.  There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix.  Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.

I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason.  Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.

I took Chris Brogan’s advice today and beefed up my LinkedIn page a bit.  I added a bit of a summary and linked out to the RSS feed on this blog.  I also wrote a recommendation for a fellow writer.  I’ve really started to notice an increase in networking lately and I’m attributing it to LinkedIn, especially after adding so many contacts.

I’m happy with the blog design for now.  I keep tweaking it every day just a little bit, so expect to see small changes.  I’m also looking to add something new to the sidebar, but I’m trying to figure out what I should toss in there.  I’m really digging the minimalistic look right now, but I’m still missing something.

I also completed a quick video preview of Friend Book for the iPhone this afternoon.  It’s not out on the App Store on iTunes yet and it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits the digital streets.  Click the picture to the left or the Youtube link at the top of the page to watch the 3 minute preview.

Just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the makers of Braid.  The art direction is utterly amazing as you can see above.  A couple drawbacks are that it’s too short and costs too much ($15) on XBLA.  It would have been priced appropriately at $10.

I did the freak-out dance today in public when a bee landed on my arm outside a local coffee joint.  It’s not the manliest of movements.  It’s like the spider web freak-out dance but with more frantic running.  I stepped on a bee when I was about seven and I’ve been deathly afraid of them ever since.

I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.