iPhone Drug Lord Game

Mashable has an interesting look at Drug Lords, a variant of the various Drug Wars games that have been around for a long time.

In the Drug Wars genre (which goes back to a 1984 DOS game), you play a drug dealer who visits various locales and buys and sells drugs, trying to load up on cheap drugs in cities with low demand and then turn around and sell them in cities with high demand. Additionally, you need to buy weapons, pay bribes to police, etc.

Drug Lords for the iPhone takes that concept and turns it up a notch by having the player competing against other players in the area — something they’re calling a Location Based Massively Multiplayer Online Game.

Sounds like fun (well, at least until Apple decides to deep-six it from the Apple Store after the inevitable bad publicity.)

Adobe Photoshop Elements Idiocy

So all I sit down with my laptopĀ  so I can upload some photos to my FTP server. Ah, but I forgot that I had installed Adobe Photoshit Elements on the laptop. Adobe has configured the program to think I’m a moron, so as soon as I insert the SD card Elements’ “Photo Downloader” application hijacks my computer — god knows nobody ever was able to copy files from an SD card to a local drive without some bloated helper application.

And “Photo Downloader” is an A-1 piece of crap that a) causes my Explorer window to freeze (it appears to lock access to the SD card for itself), and b) promptly enters an unrecoverable state, forcing me to launch Windows Task Manager to kill it.

I hate developers who presume to hijack straightforward processes because they wrongly think they can do better.

Solution: Uninstall Photoshop Elements and run the CD through a shredder. Download and install GIMP.