Yet another Xbox 360 Update.
Sorry about this, but well… the 360 is going to be the major source of new news in my life for the next few days… and what’s wrong with that, anyway? I’ve also recently noticed that I haven’t read a blog in over 48 hours. Scary, that.
Continue reading That’s Just Sick!
Well, I think I’ve spent more time playing Halo 2 on it than anything else, but that’s changing as I now have five 360 games.
What’s neat?
Continue reading Update on the 360
Went to ebGames at 9:10. Got a few fists full of swag! XBox team stopped by, too. In ebGames by 12:01. Out by 12:08. Setup in 1080i, switch my Live account to the 360, and streaming music from my PC via the by 12:42.
I am impressed… and I’m still very cold!
Now to give Halo 2 a run… got Madden 06 and Quake 4 to try out too.
w00t!
Just a couple more hours and the 360 hits the shelves on the east coast; a few more hours after that, it hits the west coast.
Which means in about three hours I’ll go line up with a bunch of other Geeks at ebGames… it’s colder tonight than it was last November 9th – that’s for sure. But I’m curious to see what the crowd is like. After all, no store is getting as many consoles as they thought… at maximum there should be 100 people in line which is much different than the 500+ that showed up for Halo 2. And they had the stock to sell that many for that launch. In addition to the short list of pre-orders that can pick up tonight, how many will stay up to midnight to claim the box? After all, their hold on the first wave lasts for 48 hours, so there’s some leeway for pick up. In fact, I’m sorta worried that there might be people there that will try the “But I’m here!” ploy to get ahead in line… knowing my luck in things like this, that would happen to my 360, if I wasn’t there. Hell, there’s a 50% shot of it happening while I am there! That’s why I won’t wait until tomorrow: fear.
Besides, I’ve already got the place cleared out for it and already tweaked my Harmony remote. Since my TV has one DVI port (used by cable) and two component (currently an Xbox and DVD player) I have to make a choice over what gets hooked up for HD. The 360 is a given, sure, but what about the other port? Rather than retiring my current Xbox, I’ve decided to pull my DVD player: the 360 should easily fill in for it for a while. As I transition off Xbox-specific games, I’ll swap the Xbox with the DVD player again, but in all honesty, the 360 supports HD and 5.1 sound – why keep the extra box around if I don’t have to? We’ll see.
Either way, cheers to the Xbox Team for their last three years of hard work – I know I appreciate it (and will appreciate it a lot more in about five hours!)
BWG: Hong Kong spas never fail to come up with even kookier ways to promote weight loss. The latest effort involves setting the customer on fire.
Hm… I wonder if – nah. I have nothing to add to this.
There are some days that you help a hundred newbs. There are days that you are a newb.
This weekend, I was a newb for a number of hours.
Continue reading Newbie.
I didn’t think it was as good as the third, in all honesty. At least from a movie point of view. The first two were rather stiff and felt like a movie adaptation of the books. Three felt like a movie that had a screenplay that was based on the book. Four is still a movie, but without having read the book, I think would have been thoroughly lost.
[minor spoilers after the jump]
Continue reading Potter: The Fourth Movie
Just got an email from Amazon, about the 50″ Plasma TV that I ordered from Tiger Direct… wait, I didn’t order a Plasma TV from Amazon. Or from Tiger Direct. Whew! It knows it might not be me:
If you are not aware of this item being bought on your Amazon.com account, Please visit the link below and
reactivate your account status:
It’s a phishing scam, obviously, but it’s an impressive one. Since most people have caught onto the “Your account has been suspended – log on to fix it!” scam, they’re one upped themselves… this one uses a lie within a lie to get you to click through to the mocked up Amazon login page.
My parents wouldn’t stand a chance.
Washington Post: Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter’s poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson. She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: “I don’t do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food.”
Extreme? Certainly. Better than entropy? Absolutely! Props to the Mom for trying something. Oh, and there was another nugget in this article worth calling out…
Continue reading “Will Work For Food”
I think I’m simply shell shocked by the pre-release hoopla of the Xbox 360. Games are already in the stores, as are a bunch of accessories. There are playable kiosks everywhere. I’ve mail ordered a wired controller from online, since I forgot to pre-order one. Even went and pre-paid the outstanding balance on the console and Madden 06. All the excitement is causes a lack of blogging time for me somehow. Or so I tell myself!
And yet, in spite of all of this, I still don’t know if I have one coming to me on Nov-22! The ebGames I pre-ordered from isn’t saying a word. Pre-ordered? Don’t I work at Microsoft? Contrary to what you’ve heard or what you might assume, we get no special treatment for hardware of this magnitude. We’re in the same boat that you are: scrambling to get one. Anyway, yeah, ebGames will be open at midnight, sure. Other stores have told people what they’re position in line will be. Hell, Best Buy and Future Shop have had their entire nationwide allocation – per store – leaked online. My local ebGames is making me very, very nervous. I pre-ordered in the first wave, the weekend the 360 was announced. If I don’t get one of the first lot, I’ll want to know where I stand on the list. The least they can do is tell me how many people are in front of me. That’s all I wanna know. Grr.
On another note, I’ve opted to bite the bullet and repave my home machine – one spontaneous reboot and hard drive error too many. Give the Good Geek Karma a real test this month. Should make for an interesting week end and weekend… the box is so vintage is still has Visual Studio 6 installed on it.
Yippie freakin E.
There’s been a lot of news lately on two fronts: portable video – in the form of the Gen5 iPod and PSP – and the Xbox 360.
This has caused a lot of whining inside my head…
Continue reading Can’t We All Get Along?
Neopoleon.com: I never expected Microsoft to make it possible to play original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, and I am thankful. Even though the list of supported titles is rather short right now, it?s still better than nothing. […] The very first Slashdot comment from this story: “i’m currently playing far cry and battlefront 2 on my xbox, i guess i’ll have to keep it for a little while longer… damn you microsoft, damn you to hell, if apple devs can bust out with universal binarys why cant you.” This man is a cock.
I would retort to the /. comment, but the truth is that Rory has already said it all better than I could…
It’s Saturday night. I’m sitting on the couch with a mocha – from Victor’s, no less – and updating a whole shit load of album art for my iPods. The doorbell rings…
Continue reading Old Habits Die Hard
Creating Passionate Users: Forgiveness is relative. We diss Windows with impunity, but when our Mac does the same thing, well, geeez nobody’s perfect. When Clinton lied, US conservatives were morally outraged. When one of their own lies, “This is just a partisan stunt… perjury is a technicality.” When Office crashes, I swear at it. When InDesign crashes, I empathize with it.
Kathy nails it. Honest. It also supports the same argument I have over the OS itself: if Apple can include an IM client and a Media Player, why can’t Microsoft? Or Linux, for that matter… Meh.
I almost had an Episode this past Friday: I noticed that the local Ben Franklin had put up all of their Holiday decorations out. It wasn’t that it was because were in the beginning of November, mind; I had forgotten that Halloween had passed and we were in November. Yes, I’m that conditioned that I accept Halloween as the “official start” of the retail holiday season.
The good news is that Starbucks, which was lingering in an Autumn theme the last couple of weeks, transformed into its holiday mode this morning: everything was red and shiny and the Gingerbread Latte, Eggnog Latte, and Peppermint Latte are back on the menu board… as is a Chai Eggnog Latte, which just sounds wrong on very many levels…
Let the glugging begin!