Brian Risk’s Blog

If you want to follow my day to day work journal, I (of course) set up a blog: Proteomics.ME

Found this by accident. Have your iPhone playing music. Now open another application and double-click the home button.

With the new Safari browser out I’ve been trying. I really have. Safari or Firefox, what’s the difference right? Logic would have that Safari should be better. It’s made specifically for the Mac / Apple operating systems, so it’s totally faster, right? Right. It is. It is much faster for page loading and web applications. What’s the big deal then?

It just doesn’t work like how I want to. Maybe a list would be good here.

• It’s tough switching browsers because you become accustomed to all of the stored passwords.
• When I click on an RSS link Firefox does just what I want: asks if I want to put it into my Google Reader. Safari makes me use the Safari RSS reader. I hear there’s a was around it but it involves downloading something and blah blah blah.
• The final straw was when Safari renamed the files I was trying to download from my iPhone. The files have very useful timestamp information in the name and, for some reason, Safari stripped out that timestamp. Not cool.

I may try Safari again at some point. A feature I really, really liked was the history browser which had thumbnails of pages you’ve visited. That’s very handy.

That’s not many reasons. Does anyone else have a sticking with Firefox reason?

I’ve been playing Plant’s Vs. Zombies for the past week more than I would care to admit. Let me pass on some of the lessons I have learned.

Buy a rake from the shop whenever possible. They’re cheap and they buy you crucial time at the beginning of the game to plant more sunflowers (or mushrooms)

Plant at least two columns of sunflowers. Sunflowers are cheap and don’t worry about planting too many. You can always dig them up later to plant other plants once you have enough collected sun.

When you can avoid it, never plant a single-firing pea shooter. For the more advanced levels you will have to dig up these single shooters anyway, and that’s a waste of sun energy and time. If it is early in the round and you don’t have enough sun points for a double-shooter, plant a walnut to delay the zombies long enough to get the points for that double-shooter.

A chomper plant behind a walnut is a deadly combination. This combo is more appropriate early on in the game when you don’t have quite the variety of vegetation (eg. the ignition stump).

Always use garlic. This plant is one of the last that you win and for good reason. It is very, very useful. It allows you to rather than have columns of sunflowers, you can have rows of them. At the beginning of every game I start planting sunflowers in the top row and cap it off with two garlics (in case zombies chew through the first and I don’t replace it and to stave off vaulters). Repeat for the bottom row.

Avoid putting very valuable plants in the front and back rows. The front rows should be reserved for walnuts and garlic (tasty!). The back should be guns, but not your most valuable guns. Why? Because the very back rows are targets for both miner zombies and basketball launching zombies. An added strategy is to….

Put pumpkins on you back row. This will give normally vulnerable shooters a lot more durability.

Chili peppers are the most valuable destroyer. Not only do they incinerate a whole row of zombies, they also melt ice left by the zombonie machines.

Any more advice? Leave it in the comments!