Using a cellphone based system with the right kinds of encryption, fire engines, ambulances and maybe even police, should be able to control the pattern of traffic lights when they are heading for an emergency and need to navigate through crowded traffic crossings with complicated lights. I saw a fire engine heading somewhere and arriving at a crossing where they practically had to come to a halt to make sure no dumbheads were still moving. This could be avoided if all lights are turned to red for a few seconds prior to and after they reach the intersection.

How about creating a system that enables the fire department or the EMT services to hook into the traffic lights network and access the central controls? With the necessary authorizations or maybe with the right hooks to allow for an override, this system could be implemented and be very useful.

First and foremost, congrats to Davydenko for finally winning a big title. His combination of serves, speed and accuracy was too much for Del Potro. This tournament turned out to be a fantastic one with exciting matches all the way through. So many 3-setters, both groups getting close at the end, and sensational upsets. Here are my impressions of the players in this tourney.

Davydenko: Fantastic performance. We’ve always known how good he can be. When he is healthy and in form, most players find him very difficult to handle. In the finals, he showed how to play a guy like Del Potro, who was probably a bit tired after the long semi-finals. Davydenko’s out-maneuvered the big guy with sudden changes in direction, hitting deep shots mostly to Delpo’s backhand and also hugging the baseline and taking the ball early. The combination of best-of-three and indoor courts played to his strengths. He will always struggle in most Grand Slam tournaments because of best-of-five format and the varying surfaces. Australian and US Opens are probably his best bet.

del Potro: He can hold his head high knowing what a wonderful year he has had. When I first saw him play 3 years ago, he was a scrawny teenager who appeared to be totally out of sorts and was blown away in 3 sets by Djokovic at the US Open. Since then, he has bulked up a lot, fine-tuned his primary weapon, the forehand – the biggest shot in men’s tennis, has become extremely mobile for a big guy, and has gotten a hair-cut! del Potro’s going to be here for a while and he is going to make big strides in men’s tennis. He has been at the late stages of most tournaments he has played, especially the slams. His big problem is going to be at Wimbledon where he has done pretty badly. In the other 3 slams, he is going to be a contender and probably a winner.

Federer: Two things are seemingly happening. One, for far too long, other players avoided going to his forehand. Now, they know his biggest weakness is his movement wide to his forehand. For years Federer was comfortable parking himself on his backhand corner knowing that opponents would try to get to his “weaker” side. Now he finds himself completely challenged as he scrambles for shots to his forehand corner, always a half step slower, frequently resorting to his squash shot. Coupled with this weakness is his well-known unreliable backhand, particularly against the high bouncing shots that go wide (Nadal?). And then, his other problem is the lack of general reliability in his shots. With Federer, you are always expecting an unforced error – long and/or wide, a shank (should we call him “shankopotamus”??), or dumped into the net. You don’t get the feeling he is secure with any of his shots. And he is clearly nursing his back by the distinct lack of bend-and-snap in his service motion. That leaves him fairly defanged against the top players.

Soderling: Had the best year of his career in 2009. With a bit of luck and some extra energy, he could have beaten del Potrol and advanced to the finals. He played a fairly poor 3rd set and, conversely, del Potrol played a great one. But Soderling had the measure of his opponents throughout the tournament, his only other loss being to that man Davydenko. Not bad for a guy who had to step in for Roddick and might have been sitting home He will be a threat to all players in 2010 but his poor mobility is going to be exposed more often than not. He starts going for broke when he is down which can occasionally work but is not a reliable strategy. But he has tremendous weapons (serve, backhand, forehand) and is always a tough match-up. Hopefully, he can be injury-free in order to sustain his performance. And, by the way, Nadal is totally his bunny now!

Murray: Very tough that he had to be the odd one out for a semi-final spot. If not for his very poor performance against Federer, he would have made it. He had a fine year and truly became a contender for the top 2 spots, briefly reaching #2. I think he is going to have to become a more attacking player and also needs to improve his concentration. He seems to be coasting to wins and then suddenly loses. Too many sudden losses, the pressure of expectations in all tournaments he enters, and his own mental lapses are causing him not to get the results he deserves. He has some the best service return among the top players, fantastic defensive skills, and has a tremendous variety of shots when he chooses to use them. He needs to stop being a contender and start being a winner. Also needs to be injury free. Come on, with such a huge entourage of coaches and trainers, I’m sure he can do better.

Djokovic: Needs to plan his year slightly better. Although he played well in this tournament, his loss to Soderling was a tough one to swallow. His only solace is that he was the one guy who beat the eventual champion. If he had more gas left in the tank, he would probably have won this tournament. He showed enough guts and ability to win the Paris Masters and before that, bearded the lion in his den by beating Federer in Basel. Both were pressure situations, playing a big final against a huge home-town favorite. I think Djokovic showed enough of his mental strength to prove he is a worthy top-ranked player. Whether he can improve on the results in the last few months of this year is what he has to be thinking of right now. The Oz open looms large in another 6-8 weeks and he needs to play very well to regain his 2008 title. There are too many contenders for the title now, but Djokovic has the ability to be a winner.

Verdasco: He had to fight to get a place in the top 8 and qualify for this tournament. I think he got over-awed by the situation in all his matches. For a guy that has such major strengths, he lost all 3 matches mainly because he lost his nerve against tougher opponents. But he clearly was no passenger in this tournament and might well have made it to the semis if luck had gone his way and he had won at least one match and if Federer had beaten delPo. He needs to get his big serve blasting rather than hitting sliders/slices as was pointed out by Jimmy Arias. In order to that, he needs to beef up his second serve which fails him quite often and results in him spinning his first serve in. After a fantastic start to the year, he was always in the mix at the later stages of most tournaments he entered.

Nadal: Whither Nadal? What happened to the Rafa we knew earlier in the year? What we saw was an impostor, someone with the same name and looks, but a totally different game. Nadal has lost a lot of confidence in his game and yet is a major threat in all tournaments. But not in this one. He lost all 3 of his matches and all of them in straight sets. Something is seriously wrong with what’s going on inside his head. He needs to get his mojo back and stop beating down on himself. I’ve never seen Rafa show so much negative emotions as he did in this tournament. Maybe he needs to go back to sleeveless shirts! Jokes apart, Nadal’s performance did not warrant him a place in this tournament. Perhaps a Tsonga would have been more of a threat. Plus, indoors is not Nadal’s strength and he has done poorly almost every year he has played at the year-end championships. Hopefully, he will regroup and be ready for the Davis Cup finals as well as for next year. A major tennis tournament without Rafa at his best is no fun.

I have been a little under the weather the last week or so. So as I was trying while away time while recovering, I used StumbleUpon to come up with this article. Man, did I hit paydirt!

I can’t remember reading a more gripping article in a long, long time. In fact, calling this an article seems to make it less than what it is, a great story from the real world, where real people took minute-by-minute decisions to save lives. Incredible skills, incredible decisions, I could go on with endless superlatives. Whoever wrote this article, thank you for this.

On a connected note, this is a week after the terrorist-drive mayhem of killings in Mumbai, India. For a country that was able to execute a flawless mission to send a craft to the moon, I am hoping these great rocket scientists will turn their attentions to helping India come up with a security plan that will help thwart such problems in the future. And shame the politicians who are busy pointing fingers at “neighbouring countries” instead of searching their own souls.

This was supposed to be the post on my review of my new Toshiba HD-D3 player. Now I’m feeling so bummed I haven’t even turned it on all week.

After waiting for months and hoping the format wars would end, I decided to take the plunge and buy a Toshiba HD-D3 DVD player. I was taken in by the hype that the format wars would continue for a long time and that the stalemate would go on and on. I should have gone with the gut instincts that were telling me that the Toshiba price cuts were a last ditch attempt by them to lure customers. Eventually, content was going to rule the format wars. And in our world today, most DVD content is from the movie studios. Toshiba was always going to be outmaneuvered by Sony in that department. I can only say that I now have a decent “upconverting” DVD player, since the HD-DVD movies are going to dry up pretty soon. It looks like Universal and Paramount are still talking about “holding on”. Come on, for how long?  We know these movie companies are going to move on to Blu-ray.

Bottom line: Not every Sony format dies. So what if Beta, MD and UMD died? Blu-ray’s won. Time to buy some real cheap HD-DVD movies (if there are any halfway decent ones out) and enjoy them for a while. I’ll be looking for that Transformers disc to see all the great effects it supposedly has, thanks to the HTGuys podcast (scroll down the page to read the features list).

As with most people, I bought or was gifted, some new gizmos for the holiday season. Among my new acquisitions are:

1. Western Digital 1 terabyte MyBook drive
2. Toshiba HD-D3 HD-DVD player
3. Plantronics BlueTooth set
4. Sony Ericsson W580i cell phone – Mine’s the same, except for the black color

I am going to review these devices over the next few days as I use them. Unfortunately, I forgot to do the whole “unbox” thing a la Engadget! Oh well, none of these gizmos was particularly well-packed so I guess a straight, simple performance and looks review is all that I can do.

In the past I wrote about my Sony Walkman phone. During the last 3 months I have been using the Motorola Q at work. Incidentally, this is my first Windows Mobile cell phone experience. I have to say that while the comparison here is between an apple and an orange, I will focus on the usability features of both phones, rather than the fancier features like the camera or the music player.

Part of the problem with Microsoft is they seem to have taken the usual Windows route in their mobile OS as well – pack in lots of features with software of fairly average quality – and hope to improve the “user experience” as they get feedback and improve over releases. The Q, with service provided by Sprint, tends to fail me at the most inopportune moments. I have had issues of “phone freeze”, very slow response times, and the lack of features in the phone such as Copy and Paste. On the other hand, the voice recognition feature is quite good although the text-to-voice translation produces unintelligible sounds. Some program, like Google Maps, work very poorly. Now I realize the blame probably lies with Google for designing such a poor user interface, but somehow I also feel that they are constrained by the design of the hardware and the operating system.

All in all, I ‘m quite satisfied with the performance. I just wish the screen size were bigger and I had fewer menu options to choose from to accomplish things. And please, for heaven’s sake, give me a Copy and Paste feature. I so miss it!

Until very recently I thought I was one of the many Xbox 360 owners who have suffered the infamous “3 red lights” problem. I went through the tedious process of following all the troubleshooting steps from the web site. Nothing helped. Next I called the Xbox support phone number and had to suffer that irritating “recorded guy” on the phone. When I finally reached a living, breathing mammal, lo and behold, I had to again follow the same steps. Finally, they agreed that it was not a problem that could be fixed and I had to send in my console for “repairs”. That meant waiting for the UPS box they ship you and finding out that, contrary to Microsoft’s helpful written instructions, UPS expects to be paid for picking the box. Long story short, I sent it to Microsoft and in a few weeks received a “new” (??) console that worked very well. And I thought that was it, problem solved.

Ok, now the fun begins. I came back home from work one September evening and my son told me “Dad, the Xbox is not working”. So I took a look at the 3 red lights and realized this was starting all over again. This time I called Microsoft and got to the point straightaway. No waiting to follow diagnostic steps, no irritating Alex or whatever that “voice guy” is called (is he a relative of Clippy??). I even told the lady on the phone politely but firmly that I had already followed all the troubleshooting steps, that I knew exactly what the problem was and that I guessed I had to send it back to them for repairs/replacement. To her credit, she quickly realized that I probably knew something about this problem and told me they would be sending me a box. But here’s the kicker! She then proudly told me Microsoft would be giving me a whole free month of XBox Live subscription, no kidding! Now isn’t that great, considering the fact that I am already a subscriber? When I politely informed her that Microsoft’s kindness did not help and that I needed to be compensated in other ways, she was at a loss. So I knew where that one was going. To cut a long story short, I decided to ask for the instructions to send the console for “repairs”.

Update

I got my Xbox back a couple of days ago. Microsoft’s letter accompanying the console states that in the interest of letting me enjoy the experience of playing games quicker, they have sent me a replacement console with a different serial number. And, of course, I get one month’s free subscription to Xbox Live!!

I was hoping I would at least get the new version of the Xbox 360 with HDMI but no, that didn’t happen. I’d read in a blog (written by a prominent blogger) that he managed to get an upgraded console after his repair incident. No luck with mine. I’m going to start screaming now because this is the second time my console packed up. I don’t even know what kind of hardware/firmware is in my “new” console. Or which poor soul is going to get my previous console after its been “fixed”.

Conclusions

So what kind of a product is the Xbox 360? It certainly provides a great user experience for game playing. It is also a great console for watching movies and images. And I have to confess I usually go for the underdog (Numero Duo) when it comes to purchasing products. My motto is the old Avis one – we try harder. I bought the original console when the PS2 was king. I bought a Sony PSP although the Nintendo DS seems to be the king of the pile. I selected Sirius satellite radio over XM at a time when Sirius was clearly number two. I went for Dish Network over Direct TV although in this case Dish was clearly ahead on its HD programming at the time I subscribed to their service. But this “numero duo” story should be rested for another rant. Let me get back to the Xbox 360 story.

When giant corporations like Microsoft create products, sometimes things do go wrong. However, the Xbox 360 seems to have problems unlike most other pieces of hardware. I’ve owned a Toshiba TV for the last 7 years and it has never broken down. NEVER. I’ve owned a Dell desktop PC since 2000 and that thing has never broken down. EVER. How come the Xbox 360 seems to have these problems? And Microsoft’s way of soothing my feelings is to provide me free repairs and 1 month of free Xbox Live? This after I told them I already have a Xbox Live subscription. I’m going to have to write/talk to Microsoft to see what they have to say. But hey, when they don’t directly answer questions from folks at PC World, what can I expect? Not even a PR response, I bet! I’ll save my fingers till after I’ve tried to speak to Xbox 360 support. And that’s after I’ve gone past Alex.

Amongst all the PSP bashing I have read in recent months, I notice something missing. Every writer describes how bad the PSP is as a game playing console, particularly compared to Nintendo’s DS. No doubt, the DS is a better handheld gaming system. I feel Sony has not done a good job of setting the PSP in a unique niche. Let me count what I consider to be several winning features of the PSP:

1. At the time of its launch, it was one of the few that had built-in WiFi
2. It allows for browsing the web using it’s (rather clunky) web browser
3. The PSP lets you play Flash games and watch Flash videos
4. You can subscribe to podcasts through the RSS feature of the PSP
5. The display is gorgeous despite being a smudge magnet
6. The USB interface enables an industry-standard ready to be exploited

Now to some of the features that are not all that alluring:

1. That terrible UMD disk – DOA is the word (or is that a phrase??)
2. Poorly designed controls for gaming – leads to finger and hand fatigue within a matter of a few minutes
3. Sony’s constant “upgrades” to the operating system that prevents or hampers the creation of third-party applications
4. Lack of a podcatcher software – Sony’s basic assumption that everyone has an always-on, always-available WiFi connection is highly suspect at best, and ludicrous at worst
5. The “Sony crawl” with respect to add-ons to the PSP – where is the GPS, the camera (yes, yes, I know we’ve all heard that these are “available”; that’s Sony speak for we will get it to you when we desire)
6. The horribly difficult virtual keyboard that one uses with the browser, for instance

Ok, let me not get carried away. I think the PSP is a versatile device that needs a few things to make it a serious competitor in many ways to the iPod, the iPhone, and several other similar devices. Let’s hear what you have to say.

For years we have heard about all kinds of people urging the cable industry to switch to a la carte pricing. From what I am reading in the news about the Sirius-XM merger, it looks like the first companies to do so would be the satellite radio providers. That would be good news for customers like me.

However, for this kind of pricing to really be attractive and work for me, the price differential has to be a bit more substantial. I pay $13-$14 a month for the full set of channels from Sirius. If I were to just pick 10 or 15 of them, instead of the current 198, I would expect a significant drop in prices. What I hear is that the new offering of the combined companies might be a 50 channel package for $6 and change. That is okay but not good enough. I am not interested in listening to 15 out 50 channels. I would like greater differentiation in pricing. Perhaps I should stick with my current style of picking my channels, using the Favorites setting on my radio! That way, I know I am only going to listen to the channels I like.

What do you think?

Looks like Chris Satchell, General Manager of Microsoft’s Game Developer Group is in controlled release mode. Doing controlled release of the fact that Microsoft is not going to bother about Xbox 360 backward compatibility for too long.
I was just reading a Gizmodo post about Satchell predicting that by 2008 Xbox 360 backward compatibility would be a non-issue. Microsoft obliges, as usual! Here is a quote from the forums of Xbox-scene (caution – there are some real trash talking teens out there!):
“At some point we’re going to focus less on it,” he said. “When you get to the end of this year there will be a reduced focus on backwards compatibility. There are so many 360 games out there. I don’t know if it’s important anymore.”

My 5 year-old son is hooked on several E-rated games on the original Xbox console. For unknown reasons, Microsoft never came out with backward compatible versions for most, if not all, of these games. My read on this is that the selection process for these games was probably based on some survey of Xbox Live or general sales volumes of titles. Most of these games are rated either Teen or Mature, probably reflecting the highest demographic of game players. But Microsoft tends to forget that children probably form the second largest demographic.

My original Xbox console recently gave up the ghost and stopped working. After long conversations with Microsoft I was told that if I would have to pay upto $175 to get it repaired. My intention was to get the Xbox repaired so my son could play his old games that would not work on our new Xbox 360. He loves many of the new games on the 360 including Marbles, Bejeweled and even Uno! But he still yearned for his old favorites like Tak Attack, Scooby Doo, and others. I finally found that my local Microcenter store sold used Xbox consoles for between $100 and $120. There were no warranties and I took a risk and bought one for about $115. Now there is a happy youngster and a somewhat apprehensive dad, waiting for the console to pack up.

And now, of course, we hear that Microsoft is going to yank whatever little is left of this backward compatibility humbug. I read some of the comments on the Gizmodo article about how much worse Sony is. I could be hardly bothered because the only Sony gaming device I have is a PSP. All I can say is that after investing in nearly 40 games I will not have any options in case my second Xbox console dies on me.