After an otherwise bleak weekend of seeya-soon’s and somewhat stressful travel* I’m home again, with a newly installed TiVo 3 under my TV and a fist full of gift cards in tow.
Merry Christmas!
Just poking my out of my vacation long enough to give a Happy Holidays to y’all… I’ve been shunning almost all email – work and personal – over the last four days in an attempt to get clean go analog for a little while. Recharge the ol’batteries and all that.
Don’t get me wrong, though – I still have my Xbox LIVE account with me here but I just haven’t had much time to play anything while on holiday.
Merry Christmas!
Xbox LIVE Arcade Cards?
I had no idea we were doing this… I saw them at a Target in Connecticut.
Neat stuff!
Bacon: The Worlds Finest Condiment
Ooh you tasty little things…:Experiments in deliciousness: Bacon chocolate chip cookies with maple cinnamon glaze.
Just another example of why bacon should be revered.
Oh, and for good measure, I’ve heard really good things about Bacon Salt.
(Yes, they’re both real things.)
Wait, It Doesn’t Cost Extra?
As an impulse buy, I picked up the dock for my Zune 80.
Imagine my surprise to find more than I expect to in the box.
Continue reading Wait, It Doesn’t Cost Extra?
Shit Or Get Off The Pot
PCWorld: The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 These much-ballyhooed products, sites, and services, it turned out, left much to be desired.
PCWorld should be embarrassed to call themselves a publication house… I haven’t seen facts this abused in support of biased arguments since… I don’t know the last time I’ve seen it like this, but it was probably political.
PCWorld can bite my entire shiny metal ass.
Continue reading Shit Or Get Off The Pot
Vista: Custom RDP Resolutions
I’ve been using a custom resolution for Remote Desktop connections between my old notebook (1400×1050) and desktop PC’s (often 1600×1200) because I want to make full use of the space that I have, on the screen that I’m currently on. Why not take advantage of my wider screen notebook, when remoting into a PC?
The tricky part to this is that you have to edit the RDP file directly, using notepad. For the most part, I don’t recommend editing the entire file this way, but you certainly can try different resolutions by tweaking desktopwidth and desktopheight… hit and miss thing, that. If you have any reservations about this stick to the UI!
The other part of the tweaking comes into play when working with the window position.
Continue reading Vista: Custom RDP Resolutions
Word of the Year [2007]
Yahoo! News: “w00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher’s online poll for the word that best sums up 2007. For more, see the definition. And props to Chuck for the link – I would have hated to miss this one.
Finally, I can stop explaining the meaning of it to analog people. After, it looks like I’ve used it 419 times on this blog alone, dating all the way back to 2003… this post being one of my more favorites.
Of course, now that it is “mainstream” it’ll probably get over used and die before the end of the year…
Second Verse, Same As The First
I was having some issues with my Rock Band guitar. Some random strums were being dropped and the fret buttons weren’t always accurate. I say that it was the guitar because I was having trouble five star’ing the first few songs in the Solo Tour on Medium; when I switched to the wireless GH3 guitar, I nailed these songs with no trouble. Must be a faulty guitar controller.
I loved the fact that EA is willing to cross-ship a new guitar to you, if you give them a credit card, so I did that. Got the new guitar this weekend, plugged it in, and was astonished to find that the new guitar was just plain broken. Up strumming only worked two out of every five strums; down strumming either didn’t work at all or got stuck and sent multiple strums to the console. How bad was my playing with this guitar? I couldn’t tell you that; I wasn’t even able to navigate the menus with the controller.
Looks like we’ll be cross-shipping another one – I like the style of the RB guitar more than the GH3 one, even if the GH3 is wireless… never mind the fact that it should work.
Sorta getting sick of buying stuff and having to “settle” or “accept” defective parts and lower quality.
Not Complaining
Perspective is a powerful thing…
Normally, I’d be convinced that someone or something is out to get me, yet I’m feeling a little lucky in some ways and uberlucky in others.
It all depends on perspective.
Continue reading Not Complaining
I’m a Wii Magnet
Last year, I helped eight people get Wii consoles. Well, nine, if you include mine. I didn’t camp out of any of them. Didn’t get to a store early for them. I wandered into a store and *wham* there they are.
This year, I didn’t expect to be on the hunt for one. Walked into the local Target a few weeks ago and they have a bunch of them – I didn’t think anything of it, since I already have a Wii; I rarely use and I didn’t think they’d be in short supply this year. Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine who was desperate for one – I said I’d look for one. I walk into the local Target the next day: there’s a stack of 80 of them, so I snagged one.
Today, I finally tracked down an Xbox 360 Elite at a local store. Harder for me to find an Elite than a Wii to be quite honest, but whatever. Unfortunately, I was there when there were about 200 people waiting in line to pick up their Wii’s. I got in line. A sales guy comes up and says “Are you in line for a Wii? Here, take this.” I asked if I could skip the line, if I didn’t want one – he said no. I took the ticket and waited.
So, yeah: the eleventh Wii and someone has already claimed it. Since there is a shortage and these have been mostly for kids, I haven’t even been putting on a surcharge on them…
Tis the season, after all.
I CAN HAS ZUNE?
I am now… a Zune owner.
Continue reading I CAN HAS ZUNE?
The Black KKK
Fox Sports: Taylor’s death a grim reminder for us all. There’s a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.
Wow.
I mean, consider what happened to Imus, when he said one offcolored remark and then read this post from Jason Whitlock… makes me wonder what the fallout will look like. Especially since the guy is right.
Just wow.
Goth Kitty?
Spotted at the local Sanrio store, I saw this new character from the Hello Kitty universe: Kuromi.
You mark my words: when Sanrio gets tired of us and finally decides to take over the world, this will be the soldier of our destruction… especially because this one has a mouth.
Visual Studio 2008: Status Bar
I installed Visual Studio 2008 this week.* First thing I noticed? No status bar. Uwah??? Oh, it’s probably off by default, like most of the toolbars. I bet if I right click on the toolbar I can show it. No? Well then the View menu. No? Window? Team? Analyze? Debug? Build? No. No no no no no!
Tools >> Options >> Environment >> General – check “Show status bar”.
Whichever UX engineer decided that developers do not want the status bar to be shown as a defaulted option is either a sadist or someone that has never met a developer. Whoever authorized this as the default option needs to be dragged over a field of broken glass and dripped in alcohol. If it’s a missed bug, I’m appalled because it means that someone wasn’t running with either a clean machine or migrated their options from VS2005. If it’s a found bug, and Triage decided to simply release note it, they also get the field of broken glass but they get to get dipped in lemon juice and rolled in sugar. In case you couldn’t tell, you’re pretty much boned without a visible status bad: you don’t even know when a build is done, without it.
And I don’t care who it was – even if it was BillG himself – but whoever decided to hide the bloody “Show status bar” on the Options dialog [that has at least 500 set-able options] rather than making it available on the View menu or context-sensitive toolbar menu, well, they’re just wrong to put it there.
Continue reading Visual Studio 2008: Status Bar