Published on
September 29, 2007 in
Gaming.
I broke down and picked up Halo 3 last night. I had tried to tell myself that it was just a fad and I should skip it. It also didn’t hurt that I suck at twitch gaming and the beta didn’t impress me too much. Well, the advertising finally did it’s work and I grabbed it. I played a bit of the single player yesterday and 1 multiplayer match. I’m still not good, but I am having fun, so I guess it is worthwhile.
Here is my Halo 3 Service Record.
If you want to play online, drop me a message on Xbox Live, but understand that I suck and don’t take this to seriously 
Published on
September 27, 2007 in
TV.
Tags: review.
I just finished watching the series/season premieres of Bionic Woman and Smallville. I’ll quickly get Smallville out of the way quickly. The show is the same show that has been on the air for seven seasons now. It just keeps pushing more and more obvious, yet popcornishly entertaining plotlines. This is one of my brain dead fun shows that I catch from time to time.
On to the re-imagined Bionic Woman. I enjoyed this first show, but the reviews so far seem horrible. Not to say that the premiere was outstanding, but it was enjoyable. There were some VERY bad scripted comments and some uninspired acting, but it was still fun. I mean if you can take a show and have a moderately (or better) attractive female star who kicks ass (consider Dark Angel with Jessica Alba) then what’s not to like. I can’t say this show will win awards nor am I convinced that it will make it through the full run of it’s first season, but hell, I had fun watching it. Michelle Ryan probably wouldn’t be my first pick for lead, but she did okay and I did enjoy Miguel Ferrer and Katee Sackhoff.
Let’s go with a B+ given that it was at least a fun night to kick back on the couch after Ben went to sleep and zone out for a bit
Published on
September 27, 2007 in
Music.
Tags: review.
So, for the past day or so, I’ve been playing around with Amazonmp3.com. I’ve only bought a handful of tracks so far, but all in all, I must say that I like the product, the storefront a bit less so.
First off, the music itself. The songs are 256kbit MP3s that come with tags pre-populated and cover artwork. The quality seems good to me, but I can’t tell the difference between a 128kbit and 256kbit file. My ears just are good enough I suppose. However, it all sounds good to me. The genre doesn’t seem to be populated correctly to me, but that is a minor quibble. Oh, and most important of all, the songs play just fine on my iPod
The storefront is okay, but not great. There isn’t nearly enough there, but it is just getting started. The ability to listen to all the tracks intuitively in the browser is also nice (only tried Firefox so far). I also like the downloader which I have tested on Windows XP. It does what it should in that it pulls down the files and loads them into iTunes for me. Also, the price is getting closer to what it should be. However, I still think digital downloads should get cheaper. The only complaint I have so far is that there is no shopping cart feature and I get an e-mail order acknowledgment for every single song purchase. I just wish I could bundle individual songs together and buy all at once as I feel the process is a bit slow right now if you’re picking out lots of songs from a given artist rather than a whole album.
So, all in all, this isn’t as slick as iTunes Store, but it is a bit better priced for on the whole higher quality drm free songs which can’t all be found in that format in iTunes. I will probably continue to shop both storefronts to get all the music I want at good prices which is what I assume Amazon is hoping for…
Published on
September 25, 2007 in
Personal.
So, last week I backslid 0.6 pounds to 330.0 pounds and this week I went down by 1.8 pounds to 328.2 pounds (or 1.2 pounds below the lowest point I have been). The progress sure does feel to be slowing down, but that isn’t horrible. I think I am going to join the YMCA so that I can drop by the one near my office periodically and do some weight training to help augment the walking I’ve been doing. I don’t think I can fully get into a running program until I lose a bit more weight. I can feel the stress on my body, joints, and lungs when I try to run for more than a few minutes. I will just keep trying it to see what’s possible.
Wow! Over at the Kristasphere, there is now a link to some of the Johnson Automotive Badger commercials on YouTube. If you click through on the one below, you can easily find more. I still love these commercials and I hadn’t actually seen the one below before, but it is funny. I only wish they were higher quality 
Here is my original post on the badger…
Mac Rumors: Mac OS X 10.6 to Drop PowerPC Support?
Interesting if not totally unexpected. Still, as I have 3 PPC-based Macs at home and I still haven’t picked up my first Intel Mac (plan to by November) this could be somewhat painful to me, but it is a pain I knew was coming sometime sooner or later. I wonder what the fallout will be if this turns out to be true. I bet many people will be sad pandas in that case
Just as an aside, I love reading followup comments that state supporting PPC costs almost nothing…
Wow! is all I have to say. Do people have so little an understanding of what is required to FULLY qualify an OS on a particular hardware platform? Just the time to do basic testing on all the PPC machines would likely take a large test cycle/team. Everything that requires full testing takes time, money, and people. Now, that is unless you don’t really care it if works. I mean come on, you didn’t really want iTunes to actually run on that machine under 10.6 … did you? 
Published on
September 23, 2007 in
Personal.
So, I have shifted my blog over to wordpress.com. I did like Blogger, but after coming back to WordPress, things just feel better. I also paid my $10/year to get custom DNS setup (free from Blogger), but WordPress seems to have some key advantages and a few disadvantages.
Pros:
- Easy export of data available
- UI feels more polished (very subjective)
- Able to import all my Blogger and previous WordPress entries
- Non-blog post pages
Cons:
- So far, I see no way to post via SMS/MMS
- Theme much less customizable (at least for free)
I’ll just have to see how things go. $10 is definitely worth it to give this a run and see how it goes…
Well, it has been an eventful night. Heather was at the gym and salon around 4:30PM and I was hanging out with Ben. We were going to meet at 5:30PM so that she could take Ben home and I could go see Resident Evil: Extinction. He was playing in his playroom and due to a mistake on my part, got into a couple of small screws. Well, I thought he had eaten a small nail that I believed had been with the screws (which I had gotten away from him). Well, I couldn’t find the nail anywhere. Interestingly, I found my iPod Shuffle which Ben had deftly hidden under the TV stand
I ended up calling our emergency nurse line and they suggested a trip to the emergency room. I got Heather to meet us there and we spent the next 2 and a half hours there to find out through an x-ray that he had no nails floating around his tummy… THANK GOD! Well, at this point I was kinda worn and tense so Heather took him home and I ended up seeing RE3 after all.
Here is a pic from the ER room…
By the way, Resident Evil: Extinction was just a so-so film. I liked the first two so I enjoyed this one, but it still left way too much unresolved at the end. It felt rushed in the last third of the movie and gave no real closure except wrapping up a couple of loose-ends from the 2nd film. All in all, a C- I would guess.
Published on
September 23, 2007 in
Gaming.
This looks exceptionally cool. $60 and you get the game for the Xbox 360 and 4 IR remotes to play. It keeps track of which questions have been asked and supposedly you’ll be able to download more questions through Xbox Live.
Check the official page out here…
Published on
September 11, 2007 in
Personal.
So, I forgot to update last week and that may have been a sub-conscious attempt to avoid bad news as I had gained 0.8 pounds resulting in a weight of 334.2 pounds.
Well, this week has gone much better. I lost 4.8 pounds taking me down to 329.4 pounds.
Yay! I hit my first mini-goal. 29.4 pounds left to go to hit the first full goal. Given that I have already lost more weight than that, it seems less daunting now. Only the upcoming weeks can confirm my assessment…
