BYE_HATERS_01, BYE_HATERS_05, BYE_HATERS_10

I was playing Gran Turismo 5 Prologue last night and I found something interesting. I was playing the online race at the Daytona Oval track for cars with 700 performance points when I noticed three players with virtually identical screen names show up in the player roster.

Their names were:

BYE_HATERS_01
BYE_HATERS_05
BYE_HATERS_10

They seemed to be engaged in some sort of cooperative play. They didn’t play well enough to have been bots, but it got me to thinking how cool it would be to create a bot for the online version of the new Gran Turismo. If anyone can shed some light on what these guys were up to, leave me a comment on this page.

I believe they were engaged in cooperative play because at the race to the finish on the last lap I was trailing behind one of them (BYE_HATERS_05 I believe) in third place. The other BYE_HATERS were well behind us. I was drafting BYE_HATERS_05 when, as we approached the finish line, he slammed on his brakes, as if in an attempt to slow me down. Such a move sacrificed his own position in the process (he neck-and-neck with another player vying for first place). Had he been successful, it might have allowed at least one of his “team mates” to pass me.

Not sure what this is about, but I’m sure more light will be shed on it soon.

UPDATE!
This particular race event was no longer available a mere 24 hours later. Could these have been moderators having a last go at the track before the event was closed? There were a lot of “wreckers” that would play on this track and perhaps a few people got upset and called Sony. “So and so isn’t playing fair! He ran me off the road.” I know I’ve felt wronged on more than one occasion.

The Quest for the Ultimate Smart Phone ROM

I am not sure I want to go through the hassle of burning another ROM to my phone (the HTC TyTN II or Kaiser). I have this great one on there right now with the HTC cube software. The cube software took a little getting used to, but I am really starting to enjoy it. I can’t figure out why AT&T’s Tilt ROM didn’t include the cube software. Perhaps to avoid affecting iPhone sales?

From what I understand, the multitouch technology of the iPhone and the iPod Touch were developed by HTC and are best incorporated in the Touch Dual. The Touch Dual also comes with a real keypad for entering phone numbers in a hurry.

I just learned that in addition to picking the right ROM for my device, I now have to independently pick the right radio software. It amazes me how many radio possibilities there are available for the Kaiser.

You know, the audience for this post is probably pretty narrow. I figure there might be 100,000 people on the planet who would even get the gist of this topic. That’s about 0.0016% of the world’s population, or one in 60,000 people. So if you are reading this and you live in a town with roughly 60,000 people, pat yourself on the back for being the only one around who knows anything about burning ROMs to cell phones.

NBC Denounces New Media Using Its “Office” Series

I was watching the episode of NBC’s The Office when I had something of a revelation. I realized that the storyline was foreshadowing the possibility of some conflict regarding the Dunder Mifflin “Infinity” website. This is good material for the show, but I couldn’t help but notice the editorialization of the commentary vis-a-vis NBC’s recent reluctance to acclimate its business model to new technologies like digital video recorders (e.g. TiVo) and Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
The past year has seen NBC depart from participation in licensing its content to Apple after insisting Apple raise the price of downloading an episode of its programming from $1.99 to $4.99, most likely in an effort to extract itself from the agreement.
NBC has also made an effort to frustrate TiVo users by lengthening their episodes, thus “super-sizing” the episode so that it begins and finishes airing outside the scope of its time slot.
Now comes news that NBC is moving away from the business model of using commercial breaks to separate the advertising from the content. They plan instead to integrate the product advertisements into the programming itself.
NBC has also collaborated with Fox to create Hulu, an authorized content destination complete with interstitial advertising. Think youtube meets video.msn.com. It does not supply user content – rather it streams authorized broadcast content with embedded advertisements.
And in addition to all of this, it seems that NBC wants to incorporate the web into its satirization routine.
The premise of the satire is that the company employing the sales force in “The Office,” Dunder Mifflin, Inc., in its own effort to stay relevant in a world decreasingly reliant on paper, has launched an commerce site to sell paper online. The employees are asked to come in on a Saturday to place orders of sales they had made personally on the website, because the website had gone off line the previous month and the CFO, its creator, wished to inflate its sales statistics.
The reason the site had gone off line, we learn, was because to the websites’ social-networking functionality became infiltrated with sexual predators, a la Chris Matthews’ “Dateline” series, “To Catch a Predator.”
The whole theme of the show seemed to poke fun at NBC’s rival in a surreal depiction of the network’s own struggles with the internet as a medium for communication.
That’s all.