For most people, I assume, when they’re downloading videos or whatever with their bittorrent client, they simply queue up their torrents and let the program do its thing. This is how bittorent worked early on, before the advent of uTorrent, Bitcomet, Vuze and the many other clients that allow serious tweaking in the options menu.

Impatient as always, I have found myself tinkering with these settings any time a torrent is seemingly dragging its feet. The problem is, I have already set my client (I use Azureus) to optimal settings for my connection, but I can’t seem to stop myself from adjusting things like the upload speed and peer connections in the hopes that I can somehow accelerate the transfer.

The idea that I am somehow shepherding the file fragments onto my hard drive, like some RTS videogame where I’ve sent my peasants out to chop wood and mine gold, is a thought I can’t put to rest. I realize that most of the time I’m probably not contributing much to the outcome of the transfer, but it feels better than remaining passive through a long, arduous download.

Do you ever find yourself obsessively managing your torrents? Drop me a comment if you’ve turned file sharing into a videogame.

A few days ago, I posted about my defective iPhone 3G. I received this phone last Monday, but by the evening, I realized that it was broken beyond repair. That night I went through some troubleshooting with a friendly and responsive Rogers iPhone specialist and she assured me that I would receive another unit within 48-hours. So, assuming that the phone would ship out on the Tuesday, I expected it to arrive sometime on Thursday. Thursday came and passed, and by midday Friday I felt something was wrong.

I called up Rogers and went through the usually steps to speak with a representative. After a couple transfers I was connected to an iPhone specialist. I told the representative that I was still waiting for a replacement unit, and he perused my file to see what had happened. After putting me on hold to chat with his boss, he came back to tell me that my order had been cancelled!

Apparently, the lady who submitted my request for a replacement iPhone did not complete the troubleshooting checklist correctly, and as a result her boss decided to scrap the entire order. Needless to say, I was a bit perplexed. Clearly, I was expecting the imminent arrival of a replacement phone, but I guess this didn’t concern someone in management who deleted my order without making any effort to contact me or to correct the mistake made by his or her subordinate.

Later that night, after my frustrations had died down, I looked over at my almost-perfect iPhone with somewhat mixed feelings. The thought that it was going back was good and bad. On one hand, I felt annoyed by the extended delay of receiving a replacement — I hate being stuck at home waiting for deliveries and it’s almost impossible to get a tracking code from Rogers — but on the other hand, I’ll have a brand new iPhone 3G to unbox next week!

So I’ve begun to see my current iPhone as much like a test model that I’ve been allowed to take home and review. I have it in a soft case with a screen protector so that it’ll remain pristine, but short of destroying or losing it, there’s really nothing holding me back from pushing it to its limits. I’ve thought of running some battery tests, like draining it from full charge under various settings, or seeing how many free apps I can install until it breaks or shows signs of slow down.  There’s always a silver lining if you look for it, and I have to remind myself that dealing with telecoms is rarely a smooth process when you have issues.

Do you have any suggestions for testing my temporary iPhone 3G? Do you want to know how many hours of continuous Youtube it will play before dying or catching on fire?

When people think of psychology, they usually have a short list of terms that they know (or think they know) about the subject, including: relationship counseling, subliminal messages, Sigmund Freud, and personality testing. I was quite the same when I first attended school, so when I had the chance to enroll in a third year personality course, I couldn’t wait to learn about something that was mentioned so often in pop culture and the mainstream media.

Looking back, I don’t remember much from that course, but I do remember the Big Five model, which attempts to describe an individual using just five personality traits. These factors are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Perhaps I remember the Big Five (which can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN) because it was the easiest theory to recall and seemed to be the least flakey. Unlike a lot of what I learned in that course, the Big Five is backed by empirical research.

You might find it odd that you could describe a person by using just five personality traits and not the many other descriptors that you could easily list off from the top of your head. However, these factors weren’t chosen ambiguously, they were discovered by using factor analysis, which I’ll explain a little bit about.

What the researchers did was start off with a huge list of adjectives, such as: happy, anxious, creative, curious, moody, aggressive, etc. Then, through interviewing tons of people, they began to group terms that appeared to regularly coincided. For instance, a person who was deemed highly sociable had a more than likely chance of also being talkative and assertive. After this grouping had been completed, the researchers had boiled down their giant list of traits to what is now known as the Big Five. So going back to a person who might be described as sociable and talkative, this individual would probably rate high in extraversion.

I should note that a person isn’t categorized, black or white, as an extrovert (the life of a party) or the opposite (an introvert), but that they rate somewhere along the dimension of extraversion, often not at the extremes. Think of the Big Five as five separate point scales that run from positive to negative.

So does it bother you that your unique and brilliant personality can be (or attempt to be) described by just five factors? Or do you like the idea that something so complex and mysterious in nature can be easily summarized by using the Big Five model?

Are you a fan of Weeds? In these middle months, most TV shows take their summer hiatus, and thus, the cable channels are awash with reruns and filler material. This is how I found Weeds, the Showtime comedy series that’s currently airing in its fourth season right through the heat of late August.

It seems that Weeds may be the only decent show on right now, although I have to admit that I’ve not been much of a TV watcher since broadband Internet came along over 10 years ago. Still, compared to the other comedies that I enjoy, such as Entourage and Californication, the show holds its own as a fun half-hour of R-rated humor, stuffed to the brim with politically incorrect content and brusque one-liners that often have me laughing out loud.

Weeds is a show that relentlessly pokes fun at various ethnic groups, the rich, the poor, fat kids, ugly people, the disabled, Republicans and, well, more than I could ever list here. It never takes a moment to apologize for its offending humor, and this is partly what makes the show so fresh and exciting to watch. Oh, and did I mention, the show’s entire premise is about growing, selling and smuggling marijuana? Finally, a show for adults that’s a world away from the terrible sitcoms I grew up watching. 

Sometimes you’ll hear me mention that Aibal is a Do Follow blog. What does that mean exactly? A Do Follow blog allows commenters to drop a link pointing back to their own website when they comment on mine. In addition, a Do follow blog permits such links to be fully recognized by the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. This benefits the target website, as search engines are able to identify the connection (link) between my site and theirs which helps promote the commenter’s website on these services.

The way this works – and bare with me for this is a gross simplification — is that all modern search engines count the amount of links pointing to a particular website to gauge its importance. There are many other factors besides this, but generally speaking, the more links that point to a particular website, the more traffic that site will receive from the various search engines.

The alternative to Do Follow blogs are sites that have No Follow links in their comments section. This style of linking forbids search engines from recognizing (following) the links posted by commenters. Using No Follow links, blog visitors can still see and click on a commenter’s link, but search engines pretend that it’s not really there.

Currently, the vast majority of blogs out there are set to No Follow by default, as this prevents helping spammers to promote their shady websites on unassuming blogs. Unfortunately, legit bloggers aren’t able to fully promote their websites when commenting on these sites. The best solution, if you’re a blogger like myself and want to support the community, is to set your blog to Do Follow and implement a decent captcha filter.

If you’re thinking of joining the Do Follow movement, you can request to get your site added to Tucson SEO Solutions Do Follow List –  a growing compilation of quality sites that are set to Do Follow. 

If you couldn’t tell from my last post, I am somewhat infatuated with the new iPhone 3G. So with a lot of joy, I found a UPS box sitting on my counter top when I got home the other day. Inside, was the nicest phone I’d ever owned, but an hour later I knew I’d have to send it back!

The iPhone 3G, like the original iPhone and the iPod Touch, have accelerometers that sense the orientation of the device. Unfortunately, the iPhone 3G that I received had an inaccurate accelerometer. In fact, you could describe the tilt sensor as being ‘stuck’.

Using the Dual Level app that I downloaded from the iTune’s app store, I confirmed that my iPhone was getting incorrect readings from one of the accelerometers. Because of this defect, my phone believed that it was permanently placed in a landscape orientation. After witnessing the anomaly in a couple tilt-based games, and also when using the built-in calculator, I called up my telecom and got a replacement shipped out pronto.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. During the phone call to tech support, they had me reboot the iPhone a couple times and they also activated my SIM. By the end of the call, the accelerometer was no longer stuck, but it was still showing a heavy preference for the left landscape orientation — it wouldn’t even sense a right tilt. But then, several hours later, I noticed that it was suddenly responding to right tilt movements and that the Dual Level app was showing the accelerometer’s inaccuracy down to just ~15 degrees. Had the phone came like this, I probably would not have requested a replacement. However, the problem is more noticeable when apps, like games, delicately use the accelerometers. I could easily live with the phone in this state, but reselling it down the road could be a bit sketchy, and I have no plans to keep this thing into the next decade.

I’ve dealt with a lot of tech gadgets in my time, and to occasionally receive a defective product is not surprising at all. Sure, it’s disappointing, and I’d really like to start loading my iPhone with all sorts of apps and media and be on my merry way, but I’ll have to tough it out for a few more days while I wait for the replacement. In the meantime, I still get to use this almost-perfect iPhone, and it’s already made me realize that having a web browser in my pocket at 3G speeds is something that I’ll never be able to live without now that I’ve experienced it!

Do you own an iPhone or have an opinion about it? As much as I like the product, I am a bit weary of Apple’s quality control measures…

The other day I was browsing through iPhone / iPod Touch apps, hoping to find something that would catch my interest because I am seriously considering getting an iPhone 3G.

I am ecstatic to report that there’s a whole lot more than just Super Monkey Ball to load up on the iPhone. The most exciting app I found is Beatmaker. This app is a surprisingly capable music sequencer that uses 16 touch pads to hold and playback audio samples that you can upload to the iPhone. If you don’t know much about samplers, sequencers and music composition in general, it’s not very hard to pick up. Basically, you strike the touch pads and they playback a short segment of sound (e.g. drums, stringed instruments, vocals, etc.). Then you record the pattern than you played and loop it. Finally, you can string together different loops for a song.

The app costs $19.95, which is relatively expensive compared to the other offerings at the iTunes Store, but with Beatmaker, you are getting a professionally developed app that has a lot of features and capabilities; don’t confuse this app with the torrent of amateur projects that you’ve seen released for the iPhone, in fact, check out some videos of it in action to see just how awesome it can be!