New ways to waste time!!!
- What in the world???
- Also, as noted previously, I’ve broken down and bought an Xbox for the fam (well, okay, and largely for me too =:) ). I also have purchased the VERY cool Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, and with it Xbox Live for a year. I have discovered several new and exciting things since then:
- It is un-healthy for several key areas of your body to play for 5 hours, hunched over, trying to keep your head perfectly still so as not to move your Xbox Live headset.
- One or more of the following is sucking badly and causes terrible lag: the Street Fighter game itself, the server it’s connecting to, Xbox Live server, my Linksys WRT54GS router, Verizon DSL, or my 3com hub. I have gone so far as to connect the Xbox directly up to the Verizon DSL modem, and it did seem to get less laggy, but not all that much (still had pretty laggy games tonight). Any and all insight into this phenomenon of suckiness would be greatly appreciated, though having read through some online forums, I think it’s mostly a function of how Capcom wrote their online fighting games.
- It is simultaneously absolutely fun and entirely unhealthy to play said Xbox Live games from roughly 8:30 p.m. until 12:30 a.m. for 4 nights in a row.
- The average Xbox Live citizen curses approximately once every 9 words. This is a rough average, mind you, and there are those who are striving to achieve a higher ratio of foul language per meaningful conversation, and thankfully a few under-achievers too. Due to this, unfortunately, I shall not be able to let my kiddos play games with the headset on. Pity.
- Apparently, it takes longer than 2 weeks to get something from Hong Kong via Global Priority mail.
My first KDE CVS commit!
I am so proud. =:) My first KDE CVS commit!
Billy Joel : I had forgotten how much I remembered
I happened to be on a date this evening with my lovely bride and my eldest beautiful daughter, and happened also to hear The River of Dreams by Billy Joel. I had forgotten how good he is. I think my favorite Billy Joel album is The Bridge. Probably partly because during my high school years, the girl that had captured my heart loved “This is the time” (and mentioned it in the yearbook (Hi Allison)), and partly because my Dad and I used to listen to the tape while we worked out, and partly because it is just a plain-old really-good album.
Commercials are the best things on TV
Honestly, they really are. I LOVE them. My lovely bride thinks I’m nuts, and I irritate her to no ends when, on rare occasion, we sit down to watch TV together. Rather than skipping through all the commercials like my bride does, I will very often insist on watching some of them gasp.
You say “Borg”, I say “Good clean fun”
I’ve finally broken down and purchased an Xbox. Circuit City had it combined with the DVD playback kit ($30 value) for $149.99, which seemed to be a good enough deal to fork over the money. I must say… it is REALLY nice. Microsoft has done an exceptional job at building, marketing, and “convincing” game-makers to adopt the wee beastie. The UI of the machine is very well thought-out, intuitive, and smooth.
WordPress 1.5 released!
So, they snuck this one in on me. =:) I didn’t realize that 1.5 was released yet, but apparently, it was. I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded to a completely stock 1.5 installation, as well as cleaning up the directory structures a bit so that future upgrades are easier. This means that there will be tons of 404’s in my error_log, I’m sure, but so be it.
You can have sound or sound, but not both
Like many other things, sound in Linux is not nearly as easy as it should be. Briefly, the problem is that many/most sound cards in computers these days do not do hardware sound mixing. This means that they are physically unable to handle 2 or more programs trying to ask it to play sound at the same time. Windows gets around this by having software mixing built into its sound card drivers (or kernel–who knows where it actually is). I imagine that Mac OS X does this too. And of course, for these 2 commercial (read: expensive) operating systems, this all Just Works without the user having to get involved. In fact, most Windows users no doubt have absolutely no clue about software mixing and hardware mixing. And so it should be, IMHO.
This just in, though not me
Wow, I really need a vacation. And, curiously enough, I am now on one, thank God. Just in the nick of time, I think.
The doldrums and how you can get involved
17” Powerbooks, G5s, and tigers, oh my
I ran across this article that discusses a total Mac newbie’s first impressions with Mac OS X. It’s pretty light and entertaining reading. And what it’s done more than anything has been to whet my appetite for a Mac OS X box myself. Truth be told, I’ve always loved the Mac OS, and Apple machines in general.