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I have installed a comments plugin thing, let the spam begin!

I never used to eat McDonald's, mostly because it was gross but also because I hated the pathetically tiny and ever shrinking 'burgers'. But then I was introduced to the 24 hour McDelivery service and the Mega Mac. But now they have introduced the real game changer, the Grilled Chicken Teppanyaki Burger with Seaweed Shaker Fries. Not only is it the best McDonald's burger I have ever consumed but the seaweed shaker fries are also the best fries. With the Mega Mac and Teppanyaki McDonald's only decent burger it is still behind MOS Burger and is not even close to Carl's Jr.

I have had the HTC Hero for about a month now. I wanted the black but had to get the white, but it has grown on me as has the chin. Most of the reviews on the web complained about it being laggy. So far I have only encountered lag once or twice, in general the applications load promptly and input is responsive - however when scrolling between home screens the widgets (e.g. clock, messages, etc) do not refresh instantly. The HTC 'Sense' user interface and widgets look very nice, although some of the widgets aren't well designed for the small screen e.g. the People widget has two small buttons right next to each other and 90% of the time I hit the Information button instead of the Call button.

The Android operating system (version 1.5) is stable and has a bucket load of options, tweaks and functionality. I found this to be both surprising (for such a young system) and daunting (not helped by some convoluted menus). While it is stable there seems to be some bugs/strange behaviour e.g. when changing the wallpaper of the home screen you can choose from the Wallpaper gallery but when changing the lock screen wallpaper (the option is found on the same wallpaper menu) you can only choose from Camera shots or All photos. Sometimes when receiving a call or message the screen and trackball will light up to indicate this but there will be no ringer. I find the virtual keyboard (and it's word suggestions/corrections) to be very good ... when in landscape mode, my man sized (read fat) fingers make the portrait orientation near useless and frustrating for typing more than one or two characters.

As for the hardware, it is nice and solid and as mentioned the chin isn't as ugly in real life. The camera is well ... a cellphone camera so don't go relying on it during your next trip to Paraguay. I like to turn my phone off when I go to sleep to prevent annoying late night calls and to save precious battery life, unfortunately unlike on my previous Nokia the Hero does not turn itself back on if you have a scheduled alarm - you can however turn on airplane mode which I guess is almost as good. My main gripe is that in order to access the Micro SD card slot you must remove the back cover (again unlike my previous Nokia), this is not helped by the fact that the cover is not the easiest to remove. The battery life is decent and I seem to be getting 2+ days out of it (some calls, some messages and some internet).

Overall despite the negative tone of this post I find the Hero to be a great phone and hoping version 2.0 of Android will fix a few things. It is still behind the iPhone in terms of hardware and software (OS and applications), but since it is an "open" system I think it has a lot more possibilities and is more exciting - exciting enough for me to download the SDK and start writing something, Java >> Objective-c.

Dear Canon,
I bought your IXUS 100 IS digital camera. It cost a bit more than I wanted to pay but it is looks very nice, and while I know nothing about cameras the photo quality (including night shots) seems to be very good. It has a nice big HDMI logo on the box, so I thought it would be nice to plug the camera straight into my TV and view them in 1080p glory rather than muck around with the buggy/slow windows 7 + media center + xbox 360. But perhaps I was naive to think that when paying for the non-budget model I would get a free HDMI cable... there is no HDMI cable but that is cool I can pick these up online for a few bucks. Oh wait, no I can't. Turns out it is a mini-HDMI cable (the box doesn't mention this) and even more annoying it is $70 USD but even more annoying is that only Canon mini-HDMI cables seem to work. 70 bucks, that is more than 20% of the cameras retail value and 14x the cost of a cheap HDMI cable and it makes me hate you (Canon) as much as I hate Sony and their products (playstation, minidisc, cameras, cd players, cell phones) which only seem to last me a year or less. I am sure with your marvelling engineering skills you could have made room for a standard HDMI cable or at least included an HDMI dongle. Only suckas would pay $70 for your boring cable. SORT IT OUT.
P.S. next time I buy a camera without researching it will from Fujifilm or something from the Korean peninsular.

Update: You can get a cable which seems to do the job for 5 bucks at monoprice.com.

I can't say that I have ever bought a Michael Jackson album, nor I have I ever been terribly interested in doing so. However even I can say that he was one of histories greatest entertainers and I doubt anyone will ever take his crown as King of Pop - especially these days when it seems that you can just put a wig on anyone and they go to #1 (Lady Gaga I am looking at you).
So anyway the other day I got an email from RAVAGE announcing his and Jaysage's instrumental tribute to Michael Jackson, since I like RAVAGES's work I am passing on this information to YOU the reader. You can check out more info (and the free MP3 download) at his blog.

ANOTHER THING, since my wife is always watching the E! channel (watching too much of this makes me physically sick), I could not help but notice how shameless (OK, I always knew) these lechers are, these phonies (and the rest of the media) have been smearing him for as long as I can remember and now they act like he was the best thing ever and that they never said anything bad about him. Again this is nothing new, they run a rumor about someone all month then interview them next week all buddy buddy "how's the wife and kids, that was a great soccer match last week". Even a respected (I guess he is, I am not from America, I don't know) news guy like Larry King is asking Michael's dermatologist if he donated sperm to father Michaels children, he correctly replied something to this effect "This is none of your business and has no place on public television.".
Seriously, you are scum.

Useful free software for Windows 7:

• Virtual CloneDrive - Mount CD/DVD images as a virtual drive.
• DivX MKV - Allows you to natively play MKV files in Windows Media Player/Center, this will enable you to stream MKV files to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 without transcoding.
• Avira AntiVir Personal - Anti-virus and anti-spyware.
• Foxit Reader - Non-bloated PDF reader.
• Google Chrome - Web browser

That is all.