After 4 years of knowing me, you’d think if I told Andrew that “I had a first last night”, his mind wouldn’t immediately jump to where it did. But, I digress… (and considering I’ve yet to start the real point of this post, that just proves you never know what’s going to happen with me around.)
Anyway, yes, I did have a first happen to me Friday night. I actually managed to enjoy a PSP game (Daxter) and play it for a long enough period of time that it gave me a low battery warning. Hey, maybe not the most important accomplishment in the world, but at least it shows that there are a few decent games out for it. On other other hand, I beat Partners in Time on my DS Saturday night/Sunday morning (final boss battle took almost an hour), and The Rub Rabbits along with Metroid Prime: Hunters provided nice entertainment for today.
Barring any unforseen conflicts, I have a schedule for next year which not only makes me happy timewise, but also lends itself very favorably to me working HP football again (Thursday and Friday nights). Even though this was really the only schedule that was going to work well regardless, all the classes are common to both CS and SE so I still don’t have to commit to one or the other yet. In slightly over a month I’ll be out of school for the summer, and while I don’t have any solid plans yet, you can bet that playing a bunch of games will be thrown in there somewhere (primarily handheld if I get an internship somewhere, otherwise probably mostly console with a few handhelds thrown in for variety).
I’ve already started considering what I’m going to do for the second anniversary for this blog (coming up on May 15), and while I’ve got a strong inclination towards one idea, nothing is decided for sure yet. Not like anyone reads this anyway, but it amuses me, so for that, I’ll continue. :)
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2 part post (mainly because the first one should have been done Friday night, and then the second either Saturday or yesterday):
Jeff Guebert, Sports Announcer:
Friday night I got to work a HP JV baseball game. Now, “work” for me in the normal sense would be sitting in the dugout and doing some minor taping and icing. Not this time :). Coach Gibbins was out of town for some reason and they couldn’t get anyone else, so I volunteered to run the scoreboard and do the announcing for the game. Even though I only really “knew” one of the players (one of the baseball managers from last year), that game was still insanely fun because I not only got to play with the scoreboard (always fun) but actually call out names and stuff also. It was a really different experience from training, but still a blast to do.
Finally a PSP Game Worth Playing:
And that game would be……Daxter. No, it’s not perfect; the waiting times are much more noticable than in Jak 2/3 (although maybe still only about the same amount of time) and there are a few slowdown issues, but it’s really the first PSP game that has made me go “Man, this is really fun”. Granted, my previous games have only been Untold Legends, Lumines, and Metal Gear Acid, but it no longer will simply sit on my shelf gathering dust (on its nice Logitech case which I got for Christmas :) ).
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It’s been an off and on thing for me; sometimes I’ll have it, at other times I won’t. I think it’d make my life easier if it always was, but of course this can never be the case. Oh, you want to know what “it” is? Ok, I guess you deserve to know: Warrior.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within takes the first one, keeps the same formula (a good thing), improves the combat system (again, a good thing), and shifts the focus slightly more to the combat side than there was in the first one. Note how there was no parenthetical comment after that last one. The improved combat system doesn’t make it nearly as painful as it would be otherwise, but I’m not sure if I like it or not yet. It’s generally been entertaining (except for dying and then having to resolve all the puzzles since the last save point), but I’ll be lucky to finish it by the end of the weekend. Guess that means my game comple count for this week will be the great zero. Gotta love it when that happens…
I also went up to HP tonight for one of the games in our tournament that we were playing in. Everyone that knew me appeared to enjoy seeing me, and I also learned that our state ring ceremony will be April 1st up at the stadium. We dominated (as expected) 10-1, and if the team makes it all the way to the championship game on Saturday, I’ll go up there for that one also (even though I’ll have just been done with 2 UTD games). Is it bad that I still enjoy HP baseball more??
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Ok, maybe it’s just something to do with Disc 2 of my games (although 7 did not have any issues) because 9 worked fine on the first disc, but the same thing started happening a few minutes into the second. Granted, I never actually checked to make sure those rings weren’t there to start with, but this is supposedly a more than obscure issue and Sony has been known to fix it for free. Guess that means I’m calling them tomorrow, and I won’t be finishing any more Final Fantasy games this week (and no, I didn’t try the GameDoctor on this disc, so I won’t need to order another copy of this game also :) ).
This leaves me with games like Batallion Wars (GCN) and Conker: Live and Reloaded (XBX) to finish with other games such as the 2nd and 3rd Prince of Persia (GCN) to keep me occupied. I almost wrote Ratchet: Deadlocked, but that would (unfortunately) be a PS2 game.
P.S. I’m writing this on my downstairs computer as I’ve gone up and down the stairs in my house enough in the past 30 minutes, but this 6 year old keyboard was having major spacebar spazzage for a while (although that might be for some reason the comp is accessing the HD every 1-2 seconds and not the keyboard’s fault).
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Has it been long enough since I made a post, because I could go another 2 to 3 we….ah, ok. Just checking :)
My goal over Spring Break (which I’m currently on!) was to try and beat Final Fantasy 8, 9, and 10 (and even 10-2 if I had the time). You heard me right, “was”. I got through the first disc of 8, but upon loading the second disc, my PS2 for some reason didn’t like it and kept making this evil sounding noise whenever it was accessing it. I know it’s not my PS2 because it didn’t happen when I put in disc 1 or 3 to test, so I currently have a used copy on the way from Half.com. (Yes, I tried using my GameDoctor on it, but that only made matters worse, lol). Until it arrives, however, it seems as if I will be unable to finish that one. I’m moving onto 9 so I can hopefully still get it and 10 beat before the week is over, so I guess this is one instance where it’s a good thing each game stands on its own.
I had 3 baseball games this past Friday and Saturday, and other 3 this upcoming Friday and Saturday. The team is 9-2 now, and even though my “role” in the team is very different at UTD than it was at HP, it’s still enjoyable. Next year is still up in the air, but I might do it anyway just so it doesn’t look like I’m bowing out after 1 year. To me, exiting after 2 just looks better (but then again, I haven’t always been the one to care for how something looks).
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Since Sony showed off the Reader a month or two ago, my grandfather and I have been discussing off and on the whole idea behind eBooks. After he sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal covering it, I came up with these two general ideas for what I think will probably need to happen before this market truly takes off:
1. Unless a company can come up with as nice of a solution as Apple did with the iPod and iTunes, some format is going to need to become the “standard”. As evidenced here, there are numerous different standards for publishing eBooks ranging from the common TXT, HTML, and PDF to the vendor-specific LIT (MS Reader), PRC (Mobipocket), and many others. Devices will obviously be able to handle multiple formats, but publishers will really need to trim down the offerings to only one or two (much like WMA is pretty much the DRM capable music store standard, with the notable exception of iTunes). The music stores had an interesting development in this area when the iPod became extremely popular, but Apple refused to allow others to offer AAC downloads (which prompted the PlaysForSure platform which the iPod does not support either). Ideally, a company will come out with a device and store that integrate quite nicely and will then license that format out so that other devices can read those files and other stores can provide books also.
2. With the hardware and software taken care of now, getting the consumer to buy into this idea of eBooks is the next step. I believe the way to go about doing this is for someone to get smart and make whatever deals are necessary to move to a content-based sales platform, not a format one. Amazon would be a great contender for this (and I’ve read that they’ve already been doing this with some music CDs): the idea behind it is that you can order the hardcopy of a book for the same price as usual, but along with that you can get access to a digital version (in the widely accepted format that hopefully has been established already) for maybe 2-3 extra dollars. That gets the price down low enough that anyone who wants the digital version also can have it, but it’s also not being built into the price of the paper version. Borders and Barnes and Noble could offer the same thing via their websites, but for customers who still go into the store, offer a simple membership system with kiosks set up so that after purchasing a book, someone can either hook up their device to a kiosk and download it directly or then go online and get it from there. This concept would also apply in reverse: purchasing an eBook first might cost around half that of a normal book, but then getting the paper version later on would only cost as much as to make it come out to the same price.
Is this the best way to take on the eBook market? Maybe, maybe not. It is an idea though, and once something does happen, it’ll be interesting to see how close my vision comes to the real thing.
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This post should have been made yesterday, I’ll admit that. I have experienced one of the extremely few times that to my knowledge a school has ever made a “common sense” decision. Now, what is this decision you might ask? Well, there were two baseball games scheduled for tomorrow at UTD. We have lots of doubleheaders this season, so nothing strange about that. The weather tomorrow though is supposed to have a high in the mid-30s with a Winter Storm Warning in effect starting tonight. This meant that one of two thigs was going to happen: 1) We’d all go out there and freeze in the cold for about 5-6 hours (not top on my list, but I’m used to that), or 2) The weather would end up forcing the games to be cancelled. Ah, but there’s an Option B which was actually exercised for once which was proactively moving the games to yesterday afternoon instead. Ok, you argue, so was yesterday really that much of a better option? Considering it was a nice low 80s temperature outside with a slight breeze, I’d have to go with a “yes”. 80s to 30s in less than 24 hours, now that’s the epitome of weather in Texas.
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Kinda sad that I’m just now able to make this post, but I spent a good deal of time this past weekend and today playing through the remainder of Final Fantasy VII and finally beating it. This is the first FF that I’ve ever actually beaten, although I did come close with 10 before the whole power surge incident that resulted in me getting new memory cards and therefore losing my saved games. I really want to start on 8 now, but Okage: Shadow King, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Batallion Wars, and Metroid Prime (not to mention M&L: Partners in Time) are all calling for my attention, so I should probably take care of a few of those first. If nothing else, at least it’s another game down…
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With Engadget’s post today on the Toshiba Gigabeat S, I thought I’d make a quick list of the pros and cons of it:
Pros:
*File format support including MP3, WMA, WMV, and DivX
*20 hour audio/5 hour video battery life
*320×240 QVGA screen (which is the same as the 5G iPod, but that doesn’t make sense to me because it looks like it’s widescreen…)
*Compatibility with TivoToGo
*$300/$400 30/60GB versions (again, same of 5G iPod)
Cons:
*No software as nicely integrated and with same selection as iTunes
*Previous Gigabeat models weren’t all that good
*Buttons on side apparently aren’t labeled making navigation difficult at first
Regardless, I think this is still a major contender as a replacment for my current 3G iPod as long as the reviews when it comes out don’t drastically differ from this preview in a negative way. If I don’t get this though, the two other names which immediately come to mind are the 5G iPod (of course) and the Zen Vision:M (probably not seeing as how I’m not a big fan of my dad’s Zen Micro, but I’ll do my research).
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The Ender series (or at least what I’ve read of it so far) could seriously rival HP for being my favorite book series. I finished the last book in the Bean/Shadow Quartet today (Shadow of the Giant), and it was just as good as all the others. I’ll probably pick up with the second book in the Ender Quartet (Speaker for the Dead) this weekend, but if it’s anywhere close to what these have been, it’ll definitely be a fun read.
In other news, I hate lab reports. The ones that Ms. Leediker had us do were fine because a) there weren’t that many of them, and b) we had good instructions to follow. With one every week in Physics and another every other week for Digital Systems, that’s a lot of writing. In addition, apparently no one here can write a decent lab to save their life, so even after doing the lab ut takes lots more work than necessary to be able to produce a decent writeup based on what we were given to start with.
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