OK, I’m a dork.

I’m a dork who loves musicals.

And I’m a dork who loves Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly).

So, how in the world do I resist Whedon’s latest work, an internet-only musical called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog?

To make it even more inevitable, it stars Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and, of course, Doogie Howser, M.D.). And yes, I love NPH.

Dr. Horrible’s… is a wonderfully cheesy musical sendup of a wannabe super-villain and his arch-nemesis, with a beautiful woman and accompanying love story for good measure. If you’ve seen the Buffy musical episode Once More, With Feeling, you’ll have a good idea of the musical style (clever lyrics, hummable tunes).

Plus, it’s funny and sweet, and NPH is just about perfect.

Whedon, who’s currently preparing the very expensive-looking Dollhouse for FOX (will he ever learn?) explains the concept behind an internet-only show:

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first. 

The first two Acts are available for free on the Dr. Horrible website. The third Act goes online July 19. If, like me, you find yourself humming the songs after just a single viewing (or you just want to support the idea of original, internet-only content), you may want to buy all three acts of Dr. Horrible… on iTunes; it’s just $4.00 for the season.

Heading to dinner tonight with Torrey, he mentioned how much he’s been enjoying the MotionX Poker (dice) game for his iPhone. It was also getting favorable reviews on the App Store (4 1/2 stars) so when I got home I went online and bought a copy.

Go buy this game!

I found myself saying “just one more roll!” more times than I’d like to count. The animation is fantastic, with dice bouncing around the table and colliding with each other; the sound of the dice hitting the table and the sound track are cool; shaking the iPhone to roll the dice is fun; and the overall game play and style is just darn neat. 

What really got me though were the little flourishes the developer added. Sometimes the dice come to rest sort of on their edges against each other. If you shake gently or violently, the dice get thrown the same way, and if you shake and keep shaking, the dice keep bouncing around until you stop.

But my favorite touch is the shadows beneath the dice: they shift as you move your iPhone, as if lit from an actual light source. This was so cool that at first I thought I was imagining it, but no, here are screenshots proving it (the first one is straight up vertical; the second rotated 90º counter-clockwise; the third is upside down; click on each to see it full-sized):

With 39 dice designs, 14 collectable gems, and five table designs, all of which require you to achieve certain goals and milestones to unlock, I don’t see this game getting dull anytime soon. And at just $5, it’s priced right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just give it one more roll….

Tonight I had a problem with MobileMe’s iDisk: I kept getting an “Error -35″ while trying to access it, with a dialog that my “member name or password may be invalid”. If I went to System Preferences > MobileMe, I was in fact logged in, so my credentials were indeed valid.

I searched Apple’s Support site and found an article (appropriately titled “Error code -35″ when accessing your iDisk) explaining the issue and how to solve it. Unfortunately, they made a cardinal sin in providing a resolution: they started with a sledgehammer.

There are three specific things you’re asked to try:

1. Log out and log back in.

1. Restart your computer

2. Sign out of MobileMe, then sign back in

And yes, that’s the order they presented them. In fact, the third option is prefaced by something of a caveat: “if the issue persists, follow these additional steps”.

Why is the least destructive solution, one that you expect to work, given last? That should have been the very first option provided, followed by the log out/log in, then the restart.

Lest destructive to most destructive. This is basic troubleshooting. You don’t reinstall the OS until you’ve moved aside a preference file, and you don’t force me to tear down my environment if a simple option toggle might solve the problem.

A few weeks after getting a new computer, I still haven’t set it up: I continue to use a MacBook Pro borrowed from work. It hasn’t been a significant issue since a lot of what I do is in The Cloud™ and the rest is original creations. (If the stock market ever recovers, I’ll recover the previous original creations.)

One oddity though was iTunes. Since this is a new machine, it’s not authorized to play any of my DRM’d audio. This wasn’t a big deal because I don’t play much music from my laptop.

That is, until I went to lunch with my friend/realtor/recruiter Emily.

Over Panang Curry Chicken and Tofu, we talked about her love of All Things Ska. (So much does she love it that her soon-to-arrive BMW Mini will be white with black stripes, with a ska-themed license plate.) I love The Specials, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt and many others so I asked Em to send me her Ska playlist, which she did, along with a cool video on the history of Ska. 

Watching the video made me want to listen to more Ska, so I fired up iTunes, headed to the iTunes Store, sought out The Specials, clicked Add Album and prepared to spend $9.99 to relieve my youth.

D’oh! I’d already authorized my limit of computers. I could buy the album, but I’d have to de-authorize a computer to play it. Since one of my computers was no longer in my hands, I’d have to deauth them all. What to do?

Duh. Go to Amazon.com, of course.

Five minutes and an application download away, and I was happily buying The Specials and More Specials. Higher quality, DRM-free, and I saved a $1.50.

What’s not to love? (Well, a lot, but that’s for another entry.)

I’m going to slowly make my way through my iTunes Shopping Cart, where I keep the albums and songs I want to buy (c’mon Apple, add a “save for later” option already!) and see if they’re available on Amazon. Other than The Specials, I’ve picked up Whipped Cream and Other Delights (Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass) and Etta James’ At Last.

iTunes continues to have the (considerable) advantage over Amazon of a broader selection (in things they share, like music, videos and TV shows, and things they don’t, like, podcasts, games and iTunes U. I’ll be buying Zero 7′s Simple Things through iTunes eventually, for example). But Amazon has earned, if not the first thought in my music searches, a second-look-before-buying position, and that’s damn impressive.

So iTunes, a message to you:

Stop your messin’ around Better think of your future Time you straightened right out

— Your friend, Rudy.

If you live in California, you’ve been slammed over the head with ad after ad reminding you that July 1 starts the new “hands-free cell-phones while driving” law. And if you’re like many Californians, you’re running out to Radio Shack or Best Buy to pick up your Bluetooth headset today, instead of sometime in the last six months since you first heard it was coming.

Will I be joining the mad rush? In a word, no.

I already have more Bluetooth headsets than I could possibly need, and none of them are perfect. You can see three my five headsets below (clockwise from left): the Aliph Jawbone, Plantronics Voyager 510 and the Motorola H700. Not shown are the Apple iPhone headset and Cardo Scala 700.

Each of these has neat features and fatal flaws. The Jawbone has solid audio quality. I was easily heard on the other end while driving on the freeway with my windows down. It didn’t fit my ear very well, though, despite coming with a couple of different ear-hooks and in-ear pieces, and was hard to get on quickly (an important feature if you rather not look like a dork—ok, dorkier—all day). It’s also chunkier in person than I expected. Perhaps the new Jawbone II, which is half as thick, is better.

I like almost everything about the Plantronics Voyager 510: it fits well, I can get it on and off easily, and the sound quality was decent. Unfortunately, more than any other device, when wearing it I feel like I’ve been assimilated. 

The best thing about the H700 is its size. I just couldn’t get the darn thing to stay in place, though: it felt loose on my ear.

I love just about everything about the Apple headset: it’s thin, it fits in my ear well, it syncs with iPhone automatically (well, it’s supposed to; mine failed to do that and needed to be returned), and it doesn’t have a flashing light on it. The bad part: the sound quality was poor and the reception was weak: holding the phone in my left hand instead of my right was enough to lose the connection to the headset. “Up to 33 feet” really hinges on the “up to” part.

Finally, the Cardo Scala. As I wrote about the Scala before:

The best of the (many) Bluetooth headsets I’ve tried. Fits comfortably, is lightweight and, best feature of all, it can switch between two [bluetooth devices] with a button press. It’ll probably continue being my primary headset when I get my iPhone.

It also has a buzzer built in so you can locate it when it’s been misplaced. I’d still be using the Scala today, if it hadn’t broken apart on me. Just split in half, shamelessly exposing its circuit board to the world. I don’t remember sitting on it or anything.

I may pick up another Scala, I liked it so much (maybe it’s a bit sturdier now). I may also pick up a Cardo S-640, which is not your typical bluetooth headset. It’s a semi-wired headset, with a clip-on microphone wired to an earpiece. It looks more like a lavalier microphone. I like the idea of this because the headset will be easy to get in my ear and the microphone easily clipped to my shirt.

In the mean time though, I’ll be using the headset that came with my iPhone: those white buds with the integrated microphone. It works, it fits, and it doesn’t require recharging.

Oh yeah, and it’s free.