The normal high in Seattle at this point in the year is supposed to be 70. Today? 55. Dallas, on the other hand, is toying with 100 all week long. Last summer showed that 100 up here is extremely uncomfortable, but I really wouldn’t mind Seattle taking a cue from Dallas. Hey, le’s just average the two; 77.5 up here would be just about perfect in my world.
Since talking about my plans (or lack thereof) for the week is always so entertaining, let’s go with that. Looking at my calendar, it seems as if tomorrow at least isn’t completely boring, Tuesday through Thursday are pretty barren, and then Friday morning I actually have a training class to go to. Not exactly one of my most exciting weeks ever at this point, but hopefully some new and interesting meeting invites will fill up my mailbox (or else I might just have to create them myself).
Personal - Seattle
Prince of Persia wasn’t an outstanding movie. It was entertaining, decent, but it just never really “took off” for me. It also didn’t stay all that true to the game from what I can remember. What it did do quite well, however, was pay homage to the game series in a different (and arguably more appropriate) way. Two of the big things in the game are the panning camera to guide you through the various rooms and a lot of acrobatic jumping, rolling, and swinging. The movie had both, and I was quite pleased and amused to see them in there. I feel like it would seem odd to people who didn’t know the games, but I’m not one of those people. My score: 7/10.
I’ve been making quite a bit of progress with Fringe this weekend, and I expect that to continue tomorrow. Unless I spend all day watching episodes I won’t actually finish it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to move onto something else in the next couple of weeks. The downside is that unlike with Alias, I’ll now have another new show to watch each week this fall, and the chance of there being a time conflict grows with each new one that I add.
Personal - Seattle
Not total constraint, I’ll totally concede that, but with a DS game on sale on Amazon, I actually talked myself out of buying it. I know, quite impressive. Now if I could only do that in more than about 5% of all my purchase desires, I might actually end up buying stuff that does more than just sit on a shelf.
I think there has to be a movie in my future this weekend. Likely not Toy Story 3; I can wait a few weeks to go see it. What I’ll probably go to is Prince of Persia since it’s the oldest of the ones that I want to go see. Tomorrow should even be a good movie weather day since it isn’t supposed to be gloriously nice like it was last weekend. If I have to be inside, I might as well make sure I’m getting entertained as much as possible.
Personal - Seattle
By total accident I discovered that the newest release of WordPress just happened to come out today, so that should keep me busy on some upcoming weekend. Of course, if everything goes well, it’s like a 30 minute process. If everything crashes and burns, then I just hope I started the upgrade process early enough in the day to not put my streak in danger. One thing this will be a good motivator to do (and will I assume be part of the difficulty of the upgrade process) will be to get both this blog and JG.com running on top of the same WordPress installation. This doesn’t mean that I have any clue what I’m going to do with JG.com or when exactly it will happen, but at least it will all be up to date when I reach that point. Perhaps this weekend’s project will be reading the documentation and seeing if developers took this into account.
In talking with Andrew earlier, it appears that my travel schedule next year might actually be quite full if everything goes according to plan. January is CES, that’s pretty much a done deal for me even if I have to go by myself. June (I assume) is E3, and I wouldn’t mind going to it in LA. With the lack of any official MS holiday in between Ney Year’s and Memorial Day, I was contemplating what I wanted to do in the March timeframe to at least give myself a little break from work. As it turns out, SXSW in Austin is perfectly placed to be said break. Then, of course, we have the Hawaii trip that I’ve currently made my parents plan on, so that would probably be in late July or August. Add in all my trips back to Dallas, and there will probably be more months that I’m on a plane next year than those I’m not.
Personal - Seattle
One thing I was thinking about earlier this evening: I should really go back and replay some of the Final Fantasy games (considering, you know, I’ve only ever beaten two of them…Ever). Yes, I do realize that doing so would be highly counterproductive to playing my other games, and in the situation of 7-9, it would be near impossible. (I guess you could argue that I have 7 and 8 on PC, but I don’t really want to expend the effort to get those to work.) FF 1-6 have all come out on either the GBA or DS (or both, and I’m pretty sure I own all of them), so those wouldn’t be a problem. FF 10, 10-2, and 12 are all PS2, so they play fine on my PS3 since I at least have one of the psuedo-backwards compatible versions. Finally, 13 I just picked up for the PS3, so it would be a new experience anyway. That doesn’t even begin to take into account things like Crystal Chronicles (GCN, my Wii could play it), Tactics (GBA), Tactics A2 (DS), the DS Crystal Chronicles (which I might not even own – yeah, I can’t remember; just more support for the argument of me cataloguing my collection sooner or later), the other VII games (PS2 and PSP), and of course, 11 (of which I can’t play the console version, but I own the PC version…somewhere). Now that I type all that out, maybe you should chill out on the FF games a little bit, Square Enix?
Ok, that was a tangent I didn’t plan to go on. My point? A ton of these games don’t work on the newest iterations of their respective platforms. The solution? Release the game as a digital download, charge people more money for games they already own, and make them justify it to themselves as a “convenience fee”. Ok, so when the Wii 2, PS4, and Xbox 720 come out, what then? I’m thinking that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft better make compatibility for these downloads pretty high so that there’s not a 2nd (or in some cases of these, a 3rd or maybe even 4th) rerelease when the format issue has already been solved. For some reason, I don’t think the market will accept the disc-era argument on the underlying architecture changing as a reason for breaking backwards compatibility when there’s never a disc in the mix.
Personal - Seattle
More E3 news today: Nintendo 3DS is pretty cool, I’ll likely buy one. Playstation Move I’m not sold on, but I’m sure there will be a killer game for it for me before too long, and I’ll be on board with it also. Add in the other games shown off (mainly Nintendo’s – Zelda, Metroid), and it’s just a giant recipe for reminding me of my ongoing neglect of my current games. Rather than tackle Bioshock 2 or Oblivion, I decided that it was probably about time to give Fallout 3 a try. Judgment is being reserved for now, but I am liking it more than I anticipated.
Tomorrow is another one of my gapingly empty days, so we’ll see how that time gets filled up. If I didn’t have the feeling that other people would want to talk to me, I might just say that I’m working from home. Looking ahead on my calendar I currently have two barren days in a row next week, so perhaps I’ll want to play that then instead.
Personal - Seattle
Well, Day 0 of E3 done, and of course I’m already wishing I was there. Project Natal now known as Kinect and shipping on November 4th (for an unknown price, but rumored to be about $50 higher than I feel it should be), a slim Xbox 360 with a 250 GB hard drive, and a bunch of other minor 360 related announcements as far as integration with other services goes. Will I be getting Kinect on launch day? Possibly, depends what the preorder/availability situation is at our company store. It took them forever to even stock Xboxes, so I wouldn’t be shocked if there was at least a slight delay in the availability. If we get a sizable discount, potentially worth waiting; if we don’t, then I’m familiar enough with Gamestop to know where one is that would want my money.
This also adds an interesting dimension to the whole “Skypeing with my parents” thing since they now have a 360, and as yesterday demonstrated, the simpler it can get, the better. I expect them to be well trained enough by then so that we won’t be having these types of issues, but Kinect also seems to appear to simply the controls for playing back videos. If that’s the case, they might want one just for that functionality alone.
Personal - Seattle
I was talking with my parents via Skype earlier tonight, and for the most part, everything was working fine. Then, towards the end, Skype decided that no, it didn’t really want to maintain a connection. I assign fault to the wireless link between the router and the laptop in Dallas because I know for a fact that I shouldn’t have been having any bandwidth issues on my end. I also feel comfortable ruling out the internet speed (since we are both on FiOS, after all *shameless Verizon plug*), so that leaves that link as the only remaining culprit. See, I don’t even need to be in Dallas to troubleshoot things just fine.
Tomorrow evening my team is using up the rest of our morale budget for the year (which ends at the end of this month) by going to a restaurant in downtown Bellevue for dinner. I believe I know the location of this restaurant, but I won’t be entirely shocked if I park and then have to wander around for a little while in order to find it. It’s at a location near the not-square mall though, so my goal is really just to find it faster than it took me to locate the Red Robin.
Personal - Seattle
Getting up to the 90s is probably a little hot for Seattle (actually, I have experience – it is), but 70s? Lots of sun all day long? Yes, weather gods, I would like that! It pleases me to no end to know that you’re apparently in a great mood right now, and I have no desire to make you angry at all. You keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship…
So, even though with this wonderful weather, I probably stayed inside and watched TV or something, right? WRONG!!! Well, half and half. I did spend the morning watching TV, but then I went to Bellevue and walked around for a couple hours, going around to a bunch of different apartment complexes. I need to decide in the next couple months if I want to stay here or move someplace else, and while the status quo is totally acceptable to me, a little change might not be horrible. Also, I’d like to thank all of the apartment complexes here that don’t have fireplaces – it actually makes floorplans work quite well with all my furniture.
Personal - Seattle
Ah, soccer. How I hate you so much as a port to play, yet I find you oddly addicting to watch. Four years ago you were in the midst of a FIFA World Cup right as we were moving, and while I might have had internet to keep my company, there was only so much to do in the middle of the day. Given the choices of soap operas or soccer, the latter obviously won out. Now, I live in a city much more interested in soccer as a sport, but I’m not stuck watching it all day out of fear of going bored out of my mind.
I still have no plans for tomorrow or Sunday yet, so I’ll just be making it up as I go along. Maybe I’ll go see a movie? Maybe I’ll play some WoW? Maybe I’ll watch some soccer? Who knows what might end up happening, but you can be sure that you’ll get the full rundown, no matter how boring it actually is.
Personal - Seattle