Mike’s Blog

Jason Taylor must really want that Defensive Player of the Year award, seeing as how the Dolphins have thrown in the towel on yet another season. Now he’s stooping to a politician’s level: running a smear campaign against Shawne Merriman, the only other player who has a shot at winning the award.

Taylor cites Merriman’s steroid suspension in award race - NFL - Yahoo! Sports

It’s funny listening to a guy who is offside on every freaking snap whine about how someone else is assaulting the integrity of the game.

I got the chance to check out the Opera web browser for the Wii this morning - what Nintendo is calling the Internet Channel, and here are some initial impressions after trying it out for about 10 minutes.

Scrolling is performed by pointing in one direction and holding down B, and how fast it scrolls depends on how close to the edge of the screen you’re pointing. This works pretty well. Most sites are too wide though, forcing you to scroll horizontally as well as veritcally. By default, text is very small and hard to read, at least with standard AV cables; I’m sure S-video or component will sharpen this up greatly, but it’s still very tiny by default. There is a zoom feature, however, which works well. Entering URL’s is easy enough, but the on-screen keyboard should have additional virtual keys for TLD’s: .com, .net, .org. Finally, although you can add/edit/delete favorite websites, I couldn’t seem to find an option to change anything but the display name when editing a favorite; it seems that if a URL changes, you’d have to delete the old one and re-add it, which seems silly to me.

All in all, a promising start. It works well for what it is, although improvements can (and should) be made. I look forward to being able to play Flash-based games within the browser from my couch.

Two weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought an Xbox 360. I’d been waiting for a deal, and I finally got a good one. Gamestop offered $80 in trade ($35 more than usual) for an Xbox and $45 for a Gamecube ($20 more), then tossed in an extra one-year warranty and a copy of Call of Duty 2 for no extra charge. I picked up Burnout Revenge and an S-video cable, and ended up paying $345 for a package that would have normally cost about $560. I’d been wanting a 360 for at least six months and just couldn’t say no to that deal. I also found a deal on Phantasy Star Universe and an extra controller through Amazon. The reviews for PSU have been poor, but I’ve always been a Phantasy Star nut so it’s worth a try for $40 off.

Then three days later, I finally managed to score a Wii at Target on Sunday morning. I’d been shut out on launch day at Walmart after waiting for 3.5 hours, turned aside at Gamestop on Black Friday after another hour and a half, and missed out at Nintendo World in NYC the following week by a mere 25 minutes. Along the way I picked up all the games and accessories I needed - three games (Super Monkey Ball, Zelda, and Excite Truck), a Wiimote, Nunchuk, two Classic Controllers, and even 8000 Wii Points from Circuit City (they were $5 off, which is like four free NES games. All I needed was the system - and Target came through for me. I also picked up a copy of Madden that morning.

Finally, we had to replace our digital camera - a Canon Powershot A70 - after I bounced it off my wife’s knee the other night. It wouldn’t focus anymore, and repeatedly tossing the camera to the ground to undo the damage only made things worse. We settled on the Powershot A540, which I just picked up today. This means we’ve gone from 3.1 megapixels to 6, from 3x zoom to 4x, and we can now shoot 640×480 video at 30 frames per second for about 8 minutes. Can’t wait to play around with this.

So… can anyone spare some change so I can get something to eat?

Time Warner sues DirecTV over NFL Network ads - Yahoo! News

Hilarious. Apparently, Time Warner doesn’t remember that it’s engaged in a little deceptive advertising itself. Do as I say and not as I do, eh boys?