If you read the Australian news every so often, then you would know that we are currently going through an ice epidemic. If you’re not familiar, Ice is slang for crystal methamphetamine or crystal meth. Is Breaking Bad to blame? Who knows. However, recently I was playing Card Wars on my Samsung Galaxy S6 and the following popped up. I couldn’t help but laugh, I wonder if Cartoon Network realises how wrong this could be interpreted?
October 21st, 2015 was Back To The Future Day. The day in which Marty travels into the future in the Delorean. Countless articles have focused on the lack of hoverboards, flying vehicles or ability to time travel. Why isn’t anyone talking about dehydrated pizza? In Back To The Future: Part II there is a scene where Marty McFly’s mother rehydrates a Pizza Hut Pizza in a Black and Decker Hydrater. The pizza expands from 4 inches in diameter to 15 inches in diameter in about 12 seconds.
As much as I love my new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, it does suffer from some bad performance issues at times. Even playing non graphically intensive games or applications can produce noticeable lag. While the hardware in the phone is definitely not sub-par, a certain feature on Samsung phones since Jellybean called Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) can have an effect on the phones performance. Without going into too greater detail, DVFS causes the phone to scale down CPU performance to prevent the phone from getting too hot. The more power being consumed, the more heat generated. As a result, the phone will encounter lag when playing a 3D intensive game or CPU intensive application.
For about six months or so I have been consuming a homemade green smoothie every morning for breakfast. Some people are on the fence about them which is understandable, from the outset they look like cups of fruit and vegetables. The reason I decided to start having them was due to the fact I did some contracting for a startup in the US and I ate a lot of bad food. The startup lunch culture is intriguing, nobody brings their own lunch, you all go out and eat out as a team. I am guilty of having Mexican food a few too many times for lunch, not the healthiest option either.
Some great news for the Javascript community today. The popular and controversial fork of Node.js, Io.js today announced they had voted and agreed to joining the Node Foundation. This means that we have avoided what I was worried could have been a serious fragmentation train-wreck in a year or two when both projects were so misaligned that we started seeing module incompatibilities and one or both of the projects suffering as a result of the incoherence.
Purchased a shiny Galaxy S6 Edge and you were excited for the night edge display feature which allows you to display a clock on one of the edges of the screen while the rest of the screen remained off? You want a night clock, not a night light! In theory it is a good idea, but if you are like me, your Edge didn’t do that. In-fact, your whole screen would glow, the night edge clock would show but the whole point of it was lost. This means your battery if your phone is not charging over night would drain quite a lot.
Being a better blogger is something many of us aspire too (even I aspire to that), but coming up with things to write about on a regular basis can be difficult. Leading off the previous post I explicitly wrote called Writing Is Fucking Hard I want to share one of the ways I come up with things to write about. Many articles will tell you to write about things you love or are passionate about. I do that, I write a lot about Javascript and the web in general because it is what I love, but writing about the latest Javascript framework or language can be difficult. A post about Javascript generally requires thought, research and takes days to write.
When I found my contract with an overseas company ending at the beginning of the year, I went into job search mode. I had some runway in the bank, but I hate sitting idle and prefer to be working so I started looking for a job (a full time permanent position). I already had a LinkedIn account, so I decided to purchase a LinkedIn Premium subscription, the job search tier to be exact. I kept my premium subscription for 3 months and then I cancelled it. It didn’t take me three months to find a job, it took a couple of weeks, but I kept it out of curiosity and kind of forgot about it as well.
Coming up with things to say? Easy. Finding the time to write them down? Moderately easy. Being able to translate those thoughts into succinct words without 10 paragraphs of waste? Not so easy. Given the amount of posts I have published in 2015 alone, you could be forgiven for thinking that I find writing somewhat easy. I have no shortage of ideas and things to write about, I have at current count 12 unpublished ideas sitting in my unpublished documents folder, most of those probably will never see the light of day.
With Soundwave Festival 2015 now firmly behind us, our attention now shifts to who will play Soundwave in 2016. There are too many bands I would love to see and after my previous wishlist actually partially coming through I thought I would write up another in hopes it comes true. Thrice These guys are now back together. Before they went on hiatus they did some farewell shows, none of which came to Australia. It has been quite a while since we’ve seen Thrice in Australia, now they are touring in 2015 again, I would love to see them hit Australian shores in 2016 for Soundwave. They might even have a new album out around then, so the timing kind of makes perfect sense.