It’s times like this that I wish I could write better, because pictures don’t do this scenary justice.

I have finished playing Mass Effect 2 and I am impressed. Sure, it doesn’t have the immersive environment that Bioshock had. Also,  it doesn’t feel like playing a Hollywood blockbuster ala Uncharted 2 (that game was a lot of fun).  I love the characters, complex story, moral choices, and how they all gel together.  30 hours of solid gameplay.

I did mostly play as a good fella with a  female Shepard. By the time I launched for the suicide mission, I had all team members loyal to me. Even though I didn’t know it back then, this enabled me to save the entire crew and team.

To achieve the same, you should play all loyalty missions before you acquire the Reaper IFF. This ensures that you can quickly launch your team for the suicide mission,  thus ensuring the survival of your crew.

As for the suicide mission, this is the combo of teams I chose:

First specialist(Valves) : Legion
First Fire team lead: Garrus
First playable team: Grunt, Kasumi

Second specialist (Barrier): Samara
Second Fire team lead: Miranda
Second playable team: Garrus, Jacob

Third specialist (escape): Jack
Third playable team: Zaeed, Jacob.

Just before the suicide mission I was pacing about the room, cussing and excited at the same time. The pace of the suicide mission also helped to keep the whole atmosphere.

Btw, after the whole thing I get Kelly – and boy does she have dance moves

All in all – I am glad that this game made it to the PS3.

2. If you move toward the other exit of the same station you will see the walls sign of decay. And just as you exit you will be in the red light district. Very similar in concept to the one in Amsterdam, but a lot more shady.

3. They seem to be trying to create the perfect multicultural society out there, with this being the capital  of the EU. This is very evident inside the Atomium, which btw, is an awesome looking construction.

4. Let’s not forget the beers – too many varieties to count, the waffles – sinfully delicious, chocolatiers – who you find all over the place and the french fries. I simple love the french fries which you can dip in yummy mayonnaise or curry ketchup.

1. The red light district is not a shady area as one would imagine it to be. It is packed with tourists milling about and is very close to the Central railway station & Dam square

2. The same applies to the Coffee shops. They are found everywhere and are far from shady. And you can get the distinct smell of the stuff as you walk about at various locations.

3. The food wasn’t too impressive. I mostly saw Argentinian steak houses and the only thing I got to taste that was dutch were the croquettes. Nice, but I don’t consider them a complete meal.

4. For some reason over there, they seem to be obsessed with the penis. You can spot it everywhere and souvenir shops sell mugs with penis shaped handles.

5. Apparently Heinneken is dutch. I didn’t know that.

Instead of going over the new major features of Froyo, I will go through the little things.

Over the past 4 months or so of extensive N1 usage, I kept track of a few annoyances. Some of them were mentioned here.

1. Silent mode on home screen does not enable vibrate [Fixed - now when you swipe left the phone goes on silent with vibrate on. ]
2. Vibrate on message receipt during a call [Not fixed. Still very annoying. ]
3. Screen doesn’t go to sleep on dismissing an Alarm [Fixed. ]
4. Call screen freeze – The call screen becomes slow with the swipe motion moving clunky and there is time delay between vibrate and ringtone. [Fixed. I guess because of the overall speed improvement this is not an issue anymore]
5. Contact list scroll – The contact list on scrolling would not refresh the images of contacts [Fixed. ]
6. Gmail  address entry – The font as ridiculously huge, thus  not allowing me to see the email id, only the name [Fixed. The font size has been reduced]
7. Gmail labels – I was missing the colours [Fixed.]
8. Power Control widget overrides auto adjust background lighting. [Fixed. The power control widget has an "Automatic" setting along with the 3 other brightness levels]
9. Browser close button/option – I would really like one. [Not necessary anymore. Earlier with the phone slowing down I would have wanted to close the browser. Now the phone's response is snappy so I really don't need the button anymore.]
10. Gallery doesn’t refresh automatically – would like a manual refresh button for it. [Not fixed.  I haven't come across any refresh issue yet after the upgrade, but I would like the option nonetheless]
11. Clear SMS messages by age – Apart from just being able to choose a message count limit thread, it would be nice if old message by a configurable limit would get cleared [Not fixed.]
12. Calendar month view – The thick green bar didn’t really give a visual indication of the occupied time slot in the month view. This should ideally be colour coded according to the calendars [Partial fix. The calendar month view has been cleaned up with a narrow blue bar indicating the time slot. However there is still no colour coding as per calendar]
13. Maps – custom labels for starred items. [Not fixed. The good news is that this doesn't require an Android update. A future map update would suffice]

I am one happy N1/Android user.

However I did come across some little annoyances that seem to irritate me.

1. The N1 has this neat unlock screen that also lets you silence the phone with a swipe to the left. Unfortunately when you turn on the silent mode, vibration does not get enabled. So essentially you will miss all your calls unless you have the N1 lying in front of you.
2. During a call, if you receive a message, the phone vibrates. That can get really annoying if you receive a lot of SMSs.
3. When you receive an incoming call, I can only find the ‘Answer’ and ‘Reject’ option. No ‘Silence’ option.
   [Update: You can silence the ring by hitting the - volume control]
4. The screen never goes off after you dismiss and alarm. This can be really annoying, especially for people like me who tend to set multiple alarms. The battery slowly drains away (this matters because the battery life isn’t too great anyway) until you wake up (takes an hour for me) and press the top button to switch off the screen.

Oh, also I have been stress testing the N1 by flooding it with messages. This is not intentional and it just so happens that one of the Production systems of my client seems to be sending me 200+ SMS/hr from 0930 to 1830. This has been going on for more than a week and is also the reason why I find point 2 from above so annoying. My observations  follow:

• The phone slows down sometimes and can’t respond to a touch in time. For example, unlocking my phone took place after 10 -20 secs of the side swipe. The phone picks up only after a long set of irregular vibrations from the N1.
• I see a lot of com.process.mms force close notifications especially when I try to use any another app.
• I can’t make calls at times as either the network is busy or the phone can’t establish a connection. The call gets dropped shortly after showing the dial screen.

Enough of fussing.

I look at the last post, the date when it was published,  the current date and think of the days in between.  Was there really nothing to blog about in that gap? Or have I just become too lazy to type?

I toy with the idea of deleting this ghost of a blog. I read through some of my random posts, laugh a little at my writing. It does bring a smile to my face – so it is worth keeping, isn’t it?

I dig a little  deeper into the WordPress settings, to  see what is new and change the look of my blog a bit.  I don’t think I  want to give up yet.  No harm in keeping the blog around.

And then I type ” …  It’s that time again … “

I have tried to imagine the actual conversation and thanks to my ever optimistic/paranoid imagination made up various scenarios of how they would react – from kicking me out of the house to telling me that they secretly were the same too.

The actual conversation was way less entertaining. My dad had this disappointed look on his face and gave me that empty threat I have heard one too many times: “You will learn someday”. My mom couldn’t/wouldn’t really grasp this and, from what I could make out, seemed to think that I shifted my religion to something else. A few more words cleared that up.

Some minutes later, after a few calm words and an awkward long silence, the topic shifted and all was back to normal – and it stayed like that. Except for the extra minutes my mom prays to compensate for my lack of prayer and a little more prodding for information.

It makes me wonder, why I never told them anything earlier. Then again, if I would have told them earlier (as a student) they might not have taken me seriously.

Anyways, here is the Disclaimer: Kids, don’t try this at home. (Unless you are fairly certain of the outcome or can handle the consequences). On second thought, go ahead.

I followed intructions from here to setup the Queue, after which I created a simple java client to post a message to the Queue:

Hashtable env = new Hashtable();
env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, “com.ibm.websphere.naming.WsnInitialContextFactory”);
env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, “iiop://localhost:2809″);

Context jndiContext = null;
try {
jndiContext = new InitialContext(env);
} catch (NamingException e) {

System.out.println(“Could not create JNDI API context: ” + e.toString());
System.exit(1);
}

ConnectionFactory connectionFactory = (ConnectionFactory)  jndiContext.lookup(“jms/JMSExampleConnectionFactory”);
Connection qConn = connectionFactory.createConnection();
Session qSession = qConn.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
Queue q = (Queue) jndiContext.lookup(“jms/JMSExampleQueue”);

MessageProducer producer = qSession.createProducer(q);
TextMessage message = qSession.createTextMessage();
message.setText(“test message”);
producer.send(message);

producer.close();
qSession.close();
qConn.close();

Even after switching to the IBM JRE and adding the relevant Jars (as suggested in most places.) the program kept throwing the ClassCast Exception. Just in case you are wondering, the relevant Jars ( found in <Websphere Installation Path>/runtimes/ and <Websphere Installation Path>/lib/WMQ/java/lib/ ) are:

com.ibm.mq.jar
com.ibm.mqjms.jar
com.ibm.ws.webservices.thinclient_6.1.0.jar
dhbcore.jar
ws_runtime.jar

After googling and reading through lot of forum threads I finally stumbled on the solution. To resolve this you also need to add added the <Websphere Installation Path>/plugins/com.ibm.ws.runtime_6.1.0.jar to the classpath.  Seems simple enough, but it took me ages to find. Hence the post.