Just another Weird site…
Just wanted to wish a Merry Christmas (or happy Friday if you don’t celebrate Christmas).
Checking Google Analytics this morning I noticed that we have a fair number of visitors from the great state of Colorado, this picture is for you folks. We feelish your pain (kinda).
Merry Christmas folks.
Three days back from conferences with people who do the same thing that I do and what do I have to show for it?
A smoking credit card and a severe “Sweetwater” withdrawal later I’m home.
Nothing much changed… most of the stuff left on the counter is still there, the bedroom and office are both still disasters, the grass is a little longer, and finally I still have no beer. So par for the course on the home front.
On the work front there was only one cataclysmic event, my partner in crime at work switched from drinking a Monster Energy drink every morning to drinking coffee… actually two cups of coffee every morning. In the 4 years I’ve worked with him I would have never seen this coming in a million years. I guess it only took 4.
Of course this has led to a series of discussions about coffee in the work place. Now both of us are damned cheap so we won’t be taking the Curtis solution to our work time coffee fix. So this change of events has led to a series of discussions but the most surreal of which is the following….
N – So which coffee is better the stuff upstairs or downstairs?
T – Well it depends if you want to use the good bottle water go with the upstairs stuff but there is no sink so telling how long since the coffee pot was last emptied. Downstairs has a sink but all it has is a charcoal filter that hasn’t been replaced in 3 years. It’s all about the water here since the coffee is the same crap upstairs and downstairs.
N – huh?
T – The coffee here is all about quantity not quality.
N – Oh ok…. so upstairs or downstairs?
T – Downstairs the coffee is better.
So needless to say not only do I cover beer but I guess I’m going to have to bone up on my minutia of coffee detail.
Easier said then done since I like Folgers….
Things that just make me smile… (yes it’s been known to happen)
Health Reports on equipment that say 119,874GB Total capacity
Seeing 20,000 screaming soccer idiots in Seattle
musings of a back porch
Not playing gears of war
Grass so tall my sprinklers can’t quite get the water out totally over the top
Fridays (the day of the week)
not being on call
The Taco when I blow a porsche off the line (ok thats just me being a dick, and he had no clue I was going to do that either so I had surprise on my side)
Things that piss me off
The hiccups
beer that gives me the hiccups…
So as I’m sure most of you know by this point I went out and purchased a Xbox 360 just over a year ago now.
Much to my surprise it hasn’t blown up on me yet as most of the media reports in the gaming press would have believe at this time last year.
The main reason for the Xbox was I wanted to expand my menu of games on their native platform, outside of Valve FPS and alot of RTS and RPG games there isn’t much that comes out directly for the P.C. these days. Most of what does come out is ported from our friends in the console realm and most of that tends to be of the craptastic level for quality. It doesn’t help that I have this thing for if I’m going to play a game I don’t want to play it on a ported platform I want to play it on the platform it was developed for.
The Wii being the major exception for this rule most all of the games that came out for it that I wanted to play showed up in 2007 so I still have it and does very well sitting there just like the Gamecube did before that and the N64 before that… hmmm I’m starting to see a patern with the Nintendo stuff.
Anyway…
I’ve bought a few games over the course of the last year for the old Xbox… GTA IV (Awesome story, gun play and driving need work but the physics model is top notch so I won’t get that down on it) Rock Band 2 (also awesome and a game that is popular enough that everyone under 30 can play it) Fallout 3 (I don’t RPG’s that often.. I will get back to you on this one once I get into it some more) And of course the two games that everyone and their brother who owns and Xbox and considers themselves a “real gamer” as…. Halo 3 and Gears of War / Gears of War 2
Lets talk about Halo 3 first… up until I bought this game I was a Halo virgin. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is with Halo? I know it was a launch title for the first Xbox way back when but honestly I don’t get it. I don’t know if it my lack of understanding of the entire Halo universe and the overall story of Halo 3 and not understanding the various interactions of some of the main characters. I honestly didn’t get it. I think Curtis summed it up best when he said “You know if your going to play Halo 3, you may want to check out the first two before you do that”… I don’t know if it would have made a difference. Also beating the thing in a afternoon didn’t help it’s cause.
Don’t get me wrong I had fun with Halo and I do enjoy occasionally popping on to Xbox Live and wasting someone but honestly I don’t get what the big deal is.
Now lets talk about the Gears of War games…. obstinately the original Gears of War was the tent pole title for the Xbox 360 in 2006. Thing of it as the big blockbuster summer movie of video games that year. Think of it like “Independence Day” good enough the first time through, a passable way to kill a couple of hours of time every time you watched it after that. That is what Gears of War aspires to be… Honestly this is the first game that it felt like a chore to get around to finishing it, seriously on my to do list for the last 3 months for weekend would be something like;
Laundry
Clean kitchen / bathrooms
Yard work
Beat Gears of War
I think it was made all the worse that I knew I was only about 45 minutes of game time from the final boss, but would have to depend on my skill to beat the game since there are no cheat codes (yes I know I shouldn’t use cheat codes but some of us play games just to play games and not to improve our overall skill). I knew the Gears was really a chore when Curtis and I had a choice we could either play a 6 hour game of “Sins of a Solar Empire” and we knew it would last that long with the both of us working together or play Gears of war CO-Op for 3 hours and beat the thing from start to finish. We chose the 6 hour RTS game and loved every minute of it.
Which brings me to tonight’s reason for posting, the 45 minute save point to the end took me about an hour to get through it to the final boss. The final boss took me probably 2.5 hours of trying to finally kill. And in the end it was a lucky shot that did it (which pisses me off more then you will ever know). Now why was I so obsessed with beating Gears of War? Simple I already had Gears of War 2 and I wanted to have the full experience of beating Gears of War when I got into Gears of War 2.
Imagine my surprise when I get into Gears of War 2 and it’s basically a stand alone game! And the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.
What is the payoff you ask? Other then a few Xbox live achievements? Not a whole hell of a lot it would seem.
Good luck figuring out what song that title came from… if you get the band I will be immpressed if you get the band and song there’s a bottle of Whiskey and Box of Nilla Wafers for the winner.
It should also be noted the lyrics are what I’m hearing at 1/2 volume on my Mac… So open up your song lyric filters just a bit.
I wonder if Angels are on salary or are hourly? You know just one of those thoughts… maybe they are like clergy and dedicated to their life and don’t recieve any kind of pay per se…. it’s worth thinking about. You never know when you will run into a homicidal angel that’s been trapped in Wisconsin for a millenia or two.
Hell I was ready to go biblical on someone after a week in Milwaukee.
So for long time readers you know I have a mostly rigid policy of not talking about work… well tonight the curtain gets pulled back briefly and open up a new avenue of total and utter crap that no one but myself will care about.
I got business cards this week… I’ve been in my “carreer” for 8 years now and I never had business cards before this week. I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal to most of you, but to me it’s a moment… it means I can finally leave my laptop at my damn desk and not be worried that I will need to give someone my contact info. Yes these are the things I worry about at work because it’s just about the only thing that I can control.
And now the work curtain goes back up, pay no attention to the person pulling the strings behind the curtain.
Moving on, it’s October in Phoenix which means two things… first I have a green lawn again since I put in my winter lawn and it took right away. Second it means it’s finally cool enough at night to sit on the back porch with a whiskey drink and a laptop and blog away.
Not that I have anything to say… other then the genius playlist that I have going right now is utter crap. Oh wait it just turned to U2 from 1992… Ah Jr. High… The school sucked but the music was good.
I dont know if other people do this or not but I use Jr. High as the touchstone of adolescence but it’s also a marker for alot of other things too. Like when I discovered U2 with Achtung Baby (Mysterious Ways was the song… I drove my parents crazy with that CD) my 8th grade English and History teachers who would let us watch MTV or the Price is Right in class…. The English teacher was a new grad hired in the middle of the year and I was transfered into her class along with 25 other unruly 13 and 14 year olds… She couldn’t have been more then 23 at the time. She was probally more intersted in watching MTV then teaching us anyway. The history teacher just didn’t care, we were her only class that was Special ED. I knew it was bad when I knew more about the state of Arizona and WW2 Battles then here at 13 years old. Mind you this is 1992/1993 so it’s before the Internet and History channel in Kingman. So everything I knew came from whatever I saw on the Discovery Channel and PBS along with whatever books the grandfathers had given me.
Now that I have the old memory bank juices flowing (not that a little bit of whiskey doesnt help the process a bit) what other things stand out in my mind about the 1991/1993 time frame?
-Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog… see the part about the 23 year old english teacher and MTV…. granted this is when MTV played videos.
-Finding 120 Minutes in the summer between years at Jr. High. Midnights on Sunday on again MTV… That was the first place I saw a Sonic Youth or Suzanne Vega video… Lots of good “alternative” music from back in the day… mostly from bands that were never heard from again.
-Bill Clinton… being fully aware of and actually paying attention to a full election cycle… I’m sure that damaged me in more then a few ways.
-Whoop there it is… again MTV… I hold alot of disdain for MTV now but back in the day it was the only way I could get music that wasn’t top 40 or country. Just remember I was in Kingman the fact we had a half way decent cable system was a small miracle.
-Windows 3.1… My in depth experince with a GUI “OS” I didn’t know it at the time but it was the start of something evil. The school was still using Apple II’s w/ a green screen. I didn’t use a Dos/Windows PC until I was a Junior in High School. Also my first WTF is that thing expsoure to a floppy disk…
-Yugoslovia… being aware of a war that didn’t have clearly defined combatants and no easy answers.
-World Cup… watching a world cup for the first time and soccer becoming something other then the sport I played on Saturday Mornings in the fall.
Yes it was a momentous time… and it would seem that the bits that remain with me through the clouds of time and whiskey are the ones revoling around music and boobs….. And wouldn’t you know it those are two of my favorite things today too.
Name the song and band I lifted tonights title from… (Cody you can’t play, you know the answer) Winner gets a box of Nilla Waffers.
Bonus question… how many boxes of Nilla Wafters have I given out for prizes? (Curtis you can’t play you know the answer)
Interesting fact… time it takes from the time I click “approve” on a comment to the time I get the email on my blackberry? Just under 6 seconds… Which is all the more immpressive because I’m using Google for the email on this site and Blackberry Internet Service for my “familiar”
Yes witches have cats, wizards have owls, I have a blackberry.
While that does seem wrong… it also seems so SO SOO right.
So you want to know what is really frustrating…. importing music into your itunes library and not having it show up but you can see the files on the disk… now that is sheer frustration!
And at some point I will write something meaningful… tonight is not that night.
So the addiction Du Jour is facebook… You know it’s really great if your wanting timely updates on what your “friends” are up to when your not hanging out. At least I haven’t gone down the road of twitter, just remember I have 2.5 blogs there is absolutely no reason for me to have a twitter account too. Now there is no way to justify any of this social networking stuff other then to say, I could do things that quasi randomly qualify as socalizing or I could keep working Gears Of War (you know since that is such a new game)
Speaking of Gears of War… it’s better then I expected (so far a whole two levels into it) and I like it better then the whole Halo 3 experince. I however chalk up this feeling in large part to the fact that I didn’t get into Halo until the third one and I’m in on the first Gears title… it doesn’t hurt there is a second one coming out in a few weeks.
Ironically enough after the election… so I guess I can’t tune out Obama -V- McCain any time soon.
Damit
You know this whole thing about being one of three people who believe in the Cardinals every year is, when they are on a roll people truly think they are on a roll. And when they flop two things happen;
1. People go “Oh hey there are those lovable losers the Cardinals”!
2. People like me who talk shit about the opponent of the week end up receiving it twice as worse on Monday.
Yes it’s going to be a long Monday and if San Diego loses tomorrow night against the NY Bretts I’m really not going to be happy. I mean it’s one thing for the Cardinals to be 0-3 to start the season it’s almost unthinkable for the Chargers to be 0-3. Though after last years rough start they did make it to the AFC championship game where they lost to the Patriots who lost to the Dolphins this week who lost the Cardinals last week… So in some cosmic sense that probably means something but I’ve not had nearly enough beer tonight to even begin thinking about what that might be.
That is a question for minds greater then my own.
Now on to things that I might actually be able to do something about.
Last year I traded in my rather shitty Cisco / Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD Cable box for the sublime bliss that is a TiVo HD. And through the power of the Internet and upgrades to the operating system the TiVo has been coming out with new features. The latest of which is the ability to watch youtube videos on my 52 inch HD tv. You know because youtube videos need to be watched in 52 inches of HD. Another feature is the hook into the Amazon video no demand service for downloading pay content of TV shows and Movies as well as free Promo content (think pilots and season premieres) right off the top these are two things that I couldn’t do with my former cable box nor could I transfer shows to my desktop computer and then to another device to watch later.
So why am I writing about this? Well the question hit me recently downloading TV shows is pretty common now with iTunes and Amazon video on demand. Which if I like the show I have no problem paying for a copy that I can keep and watch when I want to how I want to (though we aren’t quite to that point yet we are finally making progress). Now what we need is a TiVo hook into Hulu.com which has tv shows for free for you to watch on the internet. And these are shows that are meant to be watched in 52 inches of HD glory. I will admit there are a couple of shows that I want to check out (Fringe, Doll House, Sanctuary) but I don’t want to record them on my TiVo since I feel that commits me on some level to watching them and I have enough crap being recorded on there and I’m pushing up against the space limits as it is in my TiVo Box. So I guess my next great hope for TiVo is to figure out a way to get Streaming programs with their associated commercials (like 5 minutes per 43 minutes of program) to stream to my TiVo… I don’t want to buy them but I do want to watch them.
So now to circle this back around… NBC has their web strategy all wrong… at least for as far as I can tell.
First during the Olympics they made you download Microsoft Silverlight to watch the competition online. Which great and all, but I don’t have that crap loaded on my either my PC or MAC and I just want to watch Michael Phelps and the Redeem Team kick some ass.
Second I was watching tonight’s Sunday Night NFL game between the Packers and Cowboys on TV and decided to check out the webcast of it. It was alright the raw feeds from the other cameras on the field are a nice touch to bad you have to sit through a commercial to get to it, sit through the commercials during the main game broadcast and if you get to click happy on the extra cameras guess what else you get? Yep another commercial. So really my only incentive to watch the webcast is to make sure I see every commercial possible.
Finally, in NBC’s infinite wisdom it has taken product placement to a whole new level and for as far as I can tell the only reason any of this is going on is because NBC has no clue. Some examples of this are Eureka on Sci-Fi (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of NBC-Universal) whose whole third season is being sponsored by Degree Deodorant (to the point that a “experimental new formula” was a key component in solving the problem of the week in one episode (my two suns).
And then there’s “Knight Rider” I expect a certain amount of cheese, but this is bordering on the absurd. First there is the obligatory Ford product placement in the new KITT (the Mustang VS the Old Trans AM)… but wait there’s more KITT has a new mode it’s called F-150 mode! So not only is NBC killing a tv show that I remember fondly as a child, but they are also turning the car into a transformer. The only way it could have been better is if another one of the new modes was “Expedition Mode with environmentally friendly and carbon neutral diesel hybrid engine” oh wait I may have given away a key plot point to a future episode.
No wonder the writers striked if I had to deal with this crap I would want more money too.
Also you may have noticed that I’ve taken the approach of calling several things out by explicit name this evening… Well this is my attempt at a Google Bomb. Maybe just maybe if I put enough pop culture geek references then maybe someone other then my 3 loyal readers will read this. Or NBC-Universal is going to be making a call to their sister company GE Nuclear Weapons and Microwaves and “take care of the trouble maker in Phoenix”
How you know you’ve been living in Arizona for to long, 88 Degrees and no breeze is a glorious night to sit on the back porch and blog.
I picked up a new iPod this week and I’ve been in awe of this little device once again. If your a long time reader you know that I spent the better part of 2004 gushing about my at the time state of the art top of the line 15GB 3g iPod. The iPod line has come a long way in that time, I picked up the new one knowing it would be infitenly thinner and have a better screen then either of the last two. What I didn’t count on as triple the battery life for some reason I though the iPod was still stuck in the 15 to 20 hour range not in 30+ territory.
And then there’s the choice of sync it to PC or Mac… and well I chose Mac this time around for no other reason then it seemed right. 6 hours later I read the first reports of iPods with iTunes 8 BSODing windows boxes. Hmmmm I made the right choice, well that and it turns out that firewire is no longer supported as a syncing cable (which dissapoints me just a bit I always have enough firewire ports I never have enough USB ports) Oh well I will survive.
So hows the lazy man playlist maker aka Genius? Take it or leave it on iTunes… I acually like it on the iPod though.
I did a genius list off of Pink Floyd’s “High Hopes” and in no particular order here is a sampling of 5 songs….
Pearl Jam, Given to fly
Radiohead, Lucky
Rage Against the Machine, People of the sun
Smashing Pumpkins, Zero
Led Zepplin, No Quarter
It’s eclectic… I can’t say that would have Rage and that particular Smashing Pumpkins song in a play list based off of a Pink Floyd song but I’m not going to entirely disagree with them either.
So genius is nice for random playlists that you haven’t been listening to for forever and a day. My only gripe is one of my long standing gripes in that there is no easy way to find and fix corrupted files in iTunes that “skip” in my iPod. And when I say skip I mean the song skips to the next song in the list.
Also the FM adapter I picked up either sucks or is broken… more research is requried.
Yes I’m Still Alive
That said… what the hell have I been doing?
Well the things that stand out in my mind are several marathon sessions of Rock Band in Colorado and even more marathon sessions of Grand Theft Auto in Arizona.
Speaking of Colorado I went to “Beer Mecca” aka “The Fat Tire Brewery” so there is that.
But yeah alot of Rock Band and Grand Theft Auto.
Rock Band has a strange effect on how I listen to music, no longer do I listen to a song I start to think about how the various pieces parts will interact in Rock Band… Like the drum opening to “Jambi” by TOOL… or the Guitar Solo’s in just about any Led Zepplin or Pink Floyd song. I have questions about Pearl Jam too specifcally “Lukin” At one point there was supposed to be the capablity to import your iTunes library into Rock Band and be able to play those songs. I’m sure that got nixed because some record label exec was mad that they weren’t making a sufficent amount of money from anything.
I do have say, any time I hear a Disturbed song on the radio I cringe when I think about the guitars/drums/vocals that would be required in Rock Band.