OK, I’m late to the party, but only because I’m picky about what I put in my pocket. I finally got a smartphone.

I got the Palm Centro (in black, not red). And I must say, it is suh, uh, weet. I’m glad I waited until the point where the UI and form factor are where they are in this device, because it made for a very nice inaugural geekend.

I’m still waiting for Android phones, because that sounds like a great platform, but only ‘on paper’ at this point; I’m a bit skeptical that the real things will be as open and easy to develop for as stated. In the meantime, I hadda get something, and PalmOS is the most open and livable smartphone OS out there (for US/Sprint people, at least).

Actually, the development situation for PalmOS has improved markedly since last time I looked (when I bought my second Sony Clie, which is gathering dust at the same rate as the first). It seems that Access has reached a pretty good level of “All applications are equal”, and getting from zero to developing full applications, with a good IDE, documentation, and simulators, is a free registration and a free (and partly open source) single download. OK, PalmOS may be old and a tad wheezy, but it’s still looking fairly vibrant from my look around, and Access may take it places in the future.

I got an unlimited data, unlimited phone-as-modem plan for a decent $40 add-on to my voice plan, so the next time I’m at Borders and can’t remember which Simpsons writer wrote a few books including some sort of sci-fi one, I can whip out my little pocket web-browser-matic and get the answer. Hope that happens again to justify the hundreds of dollars of total outlay…

It’s John Swartzwelder, who wrote “The Time Machine Did It”, among others.

Wow, this happens so rarely I just had to tell everybody (bothbody, at least). I just had a positive customer service experience. Seriously. I sent an email through a form (to Sprint PCS) and they responded within the advertised timeframe, and actually read the entire request and responded to it appropriately (and with a good answer, BTW).

It’s amazing that that’s amazing, but it is.

More about the particular service I have in the next post…

I’m looking for investors and customers for my new game engine project, Unsweetened Engine. The first customer to use this engine will have the power to redefine the FPCE genre.

Partial feature list:

• Written in clear yet highly optimized C++ (full source included with license)
• Runtimes available for Windows (DirectX and OpenGL), Linux, PS3, Wii
• Per-pixel shading features that are indispensable for realistic candy rendering, including subsurface scattering and refraction
• Easy-to-use particle system. Use it at any scale to simulate overturned display carts, context-aware vomiting, dropped change, etc.
• Royalty-free access to over 300 licensed candy models from major manufacturers
• Embeddable ribbon-candy editor allows for seamless user-generated content
• Advanced physics library with unprecedented gummi physics
• Complete implementation of the FADTSS digestive system model (developed by a nutritionist!): 37 tunable parameters allow for groundbreaking precision in real time
• A* pathfinding, IK and natural-language parsing combine to enable a new level of performance in customer counter interactivity
• 3D, low-latency, high-resolution sampling sound system (physical modeling available as an option)

Serious inquiries only, sucka.

I like to breathe fog.

I like to have ribs at 1am sometimes.