I first heard about it on NPR via podcast a few weeks ago: A UK scientist created the Mosquito tone as a form of teenager repellant. It’s an annoying high pitch whiiiiiiiiiine that age diminishes the ability for one to hear. (Truthfully, I can’t hear the one in the NPR story.)
While it serves that purpose, teenagers realized it also worked as a sound to signal things they wanted to hear (and for their peers to hear), but not adults. Say, as for the sound played by a cellphone when they received an instant message in class.
Well, it’s no longer cool, now that New York Times did a story on it today and practically every adult I know has been e-mailing each other high pitched MP3s, asking “can you hear this?” (Many, I suspect, don’t read the NYT — I know I don’t — but just are passing this around as an old folks meme, like a bootleg of REO Speedwagon or something else deeply depressing.)
So, naturally, I’m going to be using the tone for phone messages myself.
Sorry, kids. First snowboarding, and now this.
Well, Blizzard has done it again: They’re offering 10 day passes for new players to try out World of Warcraft. Each current subscriber gets five passes to send out. (In return, said subscribers get 30 days free play for each of the 10 day folks who ends up turning into a regular subscriber.)
If you have access to the disks — and with 6 million of them out there, you probably do — post your e-mail address here, and I’ll send you a pass. First come, first served.
From Cryptic Studios:
Calling all heroes and villains! The latest free content update for City of Villains™ and City of Heroes® is live and available now! Villains will find they can now climb to the upper echelons of power, reaching levels 41 to 50, and encountering the PvE zone Grandville, and the dynamically changing PvP zone Recluse’s Victory. Villain content includes patron powers, mayhem missions, new power sets, new costume items and much more. Meanwhile, Heroes also get cool new costume items* and can also access the PvP zone Recluse’s Victory, where they must defend Atlas Park™ against the villains’ assaults. The ultimate battle between good and evil has begun.
Your account has been reactivated and will remain active through the end of the weekend, Sunday at 8:59pm PST / 11:59pm EST. Log-in to play now!
Normally, this is sort of the play cycle I like: Log in for free, play long enough to remember why I don’t pay a monthly fee for the game(s) (the content is just too thin, although it’s better in CoV) and then the account runs out again.
This time, though, it means hunting down all my CoH/CoV disks to reinstall them. Oy.
I know this weakens my case with Jenn that my new cell phone is a work device, and not a toy, but I just want to rave about two shareware games I picked up, since I now have a phone robust enough to play them:
- Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is a quickie game, lasting to a maximum of about 15 minutes. You pilot your ship around the sector, trade, fight hostile aliens, avoid intestellar hazards and collect technology and biological specimens for big bucks at the end, all with a somewhat retro look and feel.
Other than wishing there was some better way of knowing what the value of the various items was (the final score feels a little like a crapshoot), it’s a lot of fun, and extremely well-done.
- Village Sim is a very different sort of animal than SAIS. In it, you help primitive castaways survive life on a new island with a mysterious past. You have to help them gather food, build shelter, learn medicine and handle the mysterious things on the island that predate them.
The interesting part is that the game continues even when you’re not playing (well, it notices how long since you’ve been playing and plays a bunch of turns instantly when you log back on). Fortunately, it goes slowly enough that I haven’t managed to, you know, do work or have a life and come back to find my five little castaways dead, but I have had a few surprises, like finding an old drum with something inside or my castaways picking the local berry bushes clean. An interesting little sim.
Well, my long nightmare is over: I have cell phone service again (same number as always, for those who had my number previously), but with an upgraded new Treo 650.
To my great relief, my calendar and phone numbers all transfered over perfectly. There will still be some transition time — the new Contacts info manages things automatically that previously I had to use shareware to do on the old Treo 300 (which is still doing its best imitation of a hockey puck), so that’ll all have to be transferred around manually over time — not to mention gearing up for new functions like getting my work e-mail on my phone and installing new software on this more powerful machine.
Woo hoo!
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