Gmail Gets Better

A while back (ok, a long time ago) I posted about the many Google services I use. It seems that Google has come out with another great tool to make their email services (Gmail) even more useful -- offline email.

An article over at PC World goes through and explains the details of this new tool. After reading it through it seems like this will be the perfect solution for my parents. They're the sort of people who still prefer dial-up internet (I still don't understand why) and primarily use their computer for email. With this new tool, they won't have to be online while typing up all their messages. They can compose while offline and when everything is sitting in their outbox, just connect and send.

Another reason to use this, even if you do have a broadband connection, is for backup. This provides you with access to your old email messages even if you lose internet access. A little over a year ago when I moved I didn't have a broadband connection for almost a month. This type of email connectivity with Gmail would have kept me from only using my cell phone for email. That brings me to another point, a lot of people can use their cell phones as data modems with their laptops via a bluetooth or USB cable. This would save your battery by allowing you to do all your correspondence and then only connecting to send the data.

Overall, I've been really impressed with Google's services. For those that don't know how Google churns out so many good ideas, I'll let you in on it. Google engineers get to use 20% of their time to develop their own projects. How would you like that, to spend 20% of your work day working on whatever project you wanted?

Bleh...

That's how I've felt about gaming lately. There really isn't anything new (worth playing) coming out. The old good game franchises are just bleeding themselves dry with sequel after sequel and it's taking it's toll.

Halo 3 was supposed to be the grand finale on the series, but Microsoft Gaming Studios won't let that money machine go away, so we have mediocre games like Halo Wars (Halo RTS??) or Halo 3 Recon...wait, Halo 3 ODST (they can't make up their minds).

Call of Duty had moved beyond the WW2 genre (we thought) with last year's Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, but thanks to the ineptitude of Treyarch, the franchise took a u-turn back to a genre that about every gamer out there is sick of.

There are a few good sequels out there, such as Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. It just seems that there really isn't any good new games making an impact, beyond maybe Left 4 Dead, but even then, that game gets old quick. Seriously, when I look down the top played games list lately, there isn't anything out there really that isn't a rehash of old ideas. As a gamer I want something new, something interesting, something that doesn't just seem like developers trying to recapture old memories. Even the upcoming anticipated games are pretty much all sequels (FEAR 2, Bioshock 2, etc).

Sure, there may be new games coming out, but it doesn't seem that way in the genre's I enjoy playing (FPS, RPG, Action-Adventure). Am I the only one who wishes that developers could come up with something new?

Top 20 Horde

As you most likely read previously, my friends and I made the Top 100 on the Horde leaderboards in Gears of War 2. We really should have been satisfied with that, but no, we decided to go for more. Tonight we just finished our attempt at playing through on hardcore difficulty. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way through all 50 waves. We died on wave #48. Our final score though moved us up to #15-19 on the leaderboards.


If we had managed to finish out all 50 waves we probably could have taken the top spot. Maybe we'll attempt it again in the future, but it'll probably be a long wait. The hardcore play through took us just over eight hours, with a few short breaks, by the time we failed wave #48. It'd probably take an additional hour or so to make it through wave 50.