Protected: I’m such a dork
•April 13, 2008 • Enter your password to view comments.Greetings from Las Vegas!
•April 12, 2008 • 32 CommentsAfter being pestered for the Low-Down, I thought I’d get y’all up to speed on my latest adventure.
My trip to the airport was less eventful this time around (meaning I wasn’t late), but the ride itself was quite exciting for the guy who almost died halfway through the flight. As it stands, I think if I’m going to have a seizure, I’d like to have it in a confined space with two doctors and a nurse, please.
I was delighted by not being assaulted by slot machine noise the moment the cabin door opened this time around. I’m starting to feel quite at home in the airport, actually.
Unfortunately, most cabbies have no idea where my hotel is (being off the strip and 6 months old), so I’m constantly giving directions. They also don’t take credit, so my Cash Monies are quickly being depleted. Damn it, that’s hooker money! (Okay, no.)
Why Rock Band for Wii will be somewhat lame
•April 10, 2008 • 28 Comments“So it appears you’re all pretty upset about the Wii version of Rock Band. And hey, we can’t blame you — we feel the same way! The reduced feature-set of the Wii game hurts, and like many of you, the lack of online play and DLC [downloadable content] may well force us to purchase another version.
But according to developer Harmonix, none of this is really its fault — nope, it’s the Wii that’s to blame, specifically the lack of a Wii hard drive. Quoth Harmonix design director Rob Kay: “[…] We need a hard drive. That’s what we want. The whole problem is there’s nowhere to store it. If the platform could do it, we’d jump on it.”
Which is a valid point, actually. With single songs on other versions weighing in at around 30 – 45MB, the Wii’s 512MB of internal storage would fill up quickly. We remain justifiably cross, however, at the missing online play.”
This is a good point. Unless they were to provide a 4GB SD card with every copy or Rock Band, and load their songs onto that, it just wouldn’t work.
Hey, actually, that’s a pretty swinging idea. They could even make more money off it – sell a 40 dollar upgrade, hm? It’d have to come with scores of free music already on it, naturally.
The visceral difference between 2.00/gal and 4.00/gal
•April 10, 2008 • 8 CommentsI forgot my lunch at home. See, I was a good boy and didn’t scarf my entire meal down last night, so’s I could bring it in today.
I’m leaving for LV tomorrow, and won’t be eating dinner at home, so if I don’t eat it, it’ll have to be thrown out.
On the other hand, I live 26 miles from work. I could totally make it home and back in an hour … but the gas would cost just as much as the meal. At that rate, I might as well buy food locally and save the driving. Bleh.
Hooray for working at home today
•April 9, 2008 • 18 CommentsI spent the evening creating a custom XP install disk with a program called nLite. Presuming you have your original install disk, it makes a new one with whatever service packs you want (I put in service pack 3), whatever drivers you want (I downloaded new ones from Dell), all the settings you could possibly want for an unattended install, and countless dozens of quick changes that you’d otherwise have to enable any time you reload*. Oh, and there was room on the disk for an extra folder with some basic apps (like firefox and pidgin) that I’d rather not be without.
Also, in the interest of clearing out food, I made a cheese and hot dog omelette, and had a moment of near-psychic chariots-of-fire slo-mo victory. See, I’d picked up a forkful while looking at the PC, and felt the weight reduction of a runaway hot dog slice. My left hand made a basket next to my hip as the hot dog careened off the plate and propelled itself into my waiting hand. My eyes never wavered. Yes!
Today, I have dishes to do, laundry to start, office work to do, and some personal video work to do in advance of NAB.
I’m coming to feel like Twitter isn’t right for me after all. I barely twit, and rarely find it at all useful. Mostly, I just feel annoyed at getting IMs that aren’t really IMs.
I’m incredibly lucky to have excellent people in my life. On most days I feel positive, friendly, and encouraging but I’m fortunate that my peeps remember that when I’m being a pissy bitch. ;) Seriously, the difference between friends and close friends boils down to nothing more than the phrase, “Yes, you’re being an ass. I still love you, I’ll call you tomorrow.”**
In other news, I’ve a sharp pain in the back of my throat that I hope is temporary, and I miss my girlfriend.***
* Changing default resolution, what icons are on the desktop, user set-up, removal of unused default install crap, etc.
** If you’re curious, it really is nothing, I was just feeling a bit cranky at some point over the weekend. No one really noticed except me.
*** I like footnotes
Alton Brown – geeked
•April 8, 2008 • 26 CommentsToday he was spinning around on the playground merry-go-round, and he said “Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!”
Quick, what’s that from?
Because I haven’t posted enough today
•April 8, 2008 • 14 CommentsMe: mmm self healing drives … http://www.xiotech.com/Products-and-Services_ISE.aspx
Skipford: We are so on our way to the cylons.
Me: isn’t it exciting? :)
Skipford: I, for one, welcome our new cyborg masters.
Long Beach in 3 days.
•April 8, 2008 • 22 Comments |
| From April in Long… |
I consider it a triumph that I didn’t forget my tripod in the car on the way to the airport, but really, nothing went wrong on my entire trip.
I arrived on Tuesday and met with Mark to pick up the camera I’d fed-exed, and it wasn’t destroyed in any way; the incense and fervent plea to any and all gods, as I tore open the packaging, was entirely unnecessary.
I’d rented a small SUV with a GPS to haul my equipment around, and it was both peculiar and annoying – the Hertz GPS system is counterintuitive, and inputting an address is an exercise in frustration. I found my way to the pretty Renaissance Long Beach, though, and had an entire afternoon and evening to just mess around.
Let’s start with a comment by William Gibson:
•April 8, 2008 • 6 Comments“One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable.
When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.
In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.
I read something the other day about how people “addicted to the internet or cell phones” became irritated or angry when you take it away from them, and I remember thinking, “Uhm, would you be irritated if I took away your voice?”