Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Are there real-life versions of the Angry Birds? What inspired Rovio to make their angry birds the way they are? Did they model the birds after nature in either look or function? These are questions worth answering; if you’ve played the game, you might wonder where all the angry birds came from. The real angry birds!

Red Angry Bird

Our first contestant, the bird you get first in Angry Birds, is Mr. Red. We speculate that he might actually be a Blue-throated Brown Sunbird, or perhaps Gould’s Sunbird. From the round, rotund shape of his body, we definitely know it’s from Aethopyga:

Is the red angry bird actually a sunbird?

The Angry Blue Splitters

The blue flycatcher known as Plumbeous Water-redstart, or red-tailed robin, is a kind of water bird which loves to feed on insects. They are territorial and have a red tail, a flash of contrasting colours:

What a beautiful bluebird!

The Yellow Bird

I think this is most like a baby Martin Branch Swallow, with its yellow coloration, angry face, and wide beak. In fact, the swallows and the triangle of the “little yellow bird” have something in common, a certain “hard acceleration” property. Swallows have one of the best flying air technique of all the birds, by far the fastest.

Fly fast, yellow Swallows!

Fat Black Bird

Perfectly coal black, the Common Blackbird is definitely the model for Angry Birds. The real life bird is notable for mimicry of other sounds, and is a sly trixster.

Serious business, the Blackbird

White Egg-Bomber

The white angry bird which drops explosive eggs is probably a Snow Bunting, a sort of mottled white and brown bird which lives in naturally cold climes. Sometimes they’re called “snowflake.”

Or maybe it’s a Chicken, IDK

Pictures and the idea from 如果愤怒的小鸟要拍电影; we thought it worth bringing some of the concept to English too.

Now that the iPhone 4 is offered on both AT&T and Verizon platforms, you might be wondering:

• Should I switch from AT&T to Verizon?
• I have an older AT&T iPhone, should I just upgrade?
• Is Verizon or AT&T more expensive over the life of the contract?

To answer these questions, I’ve gathered the following data:

Major cost differences between providers

New Subscriber Costs

If you are not an existing AT&T or Verizon customer, or you are signing up with either network for the first time, or upgrading after closing a two year contract, your costs are similar and easy to calculate. You buy the phone, and you pay the activation fee, which differs by a dollar. However, with a more expensive voice plan, the future liability of the Verizon plan is slightly higher:

Over two years, you pay $114 more if you open a Verizon contract.

Should I upgrade or switch?

Assume that the CDMA Verizon iPhone just doesn’t do it for you–you are going to stick with AT&T. When is the best time to upgrade? What if you’re stuck in a contract already? This chart will show the cost of switching from AT&T to Verizon compared with the cost of upgrading:

It’s very simple. If you’re an existing subscriber, you can save up to $80 by switching to Verizon between your 13th and 21st months of service. However, once you become eligible for an AT&T upgrade, it becomes $100 cheaper to stick with AT&T.

This post has been updated to correct an error in plan pricing: Verizon offers a $39.99 no-text plan with 450 minutes to perfectly match AT&T’s offering.

Recently I switched to the MediaTemple Grid Server, which at $20 a month, is much cheaper than a dedicated host. Although with ~15,000 hits a day I’m running close to the GPU limit, moving to a dedicated-virtual server is also just $50 a month. So–how well does Media Temple stay online? Do they suck like Dreamhost and 1and1?

The answer is no: Media Temple (MT) is pretty reliable. When I say pretty, here are some numbers from Pingdom, via their new free service:

Checks with downtime
Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.55% 3h 14m 52s 10 672 ms

This meant approximately 200 visitors would have missed out on my website–not a bad amount of downtime at all. However, this is just one month, and we’ll have to see if anything particularly disastrous shall happen in the future. I’ll keep you all posted!

Update: here are stats for August:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.92% 0h 34m 57s 6 905 ms

Update: here are stats for September:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.77% 1h 34m 36s 14 981 ms

Update: here are stats for October:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.50% 3h 39m 28s 15 582 ms

So far YTD my uptime is 99.69%, according to Pingdom.