Mike’s Blog

I decided to get the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on this week, since the price came down to $50 in the wake of Blu-Ray’s victory over HD-DVD.   So far, I’m impressed with the picture quality and the menu system that pops up while the movie is still playing - that’s pretty neat.   (Dumb moment during setup that I must share: I popped the install disc into the HD-DVD drive, which made a loud noise and claimed it couldn’t be read.  Then it dawned on me: of course it can’t be read, the 360 doesn’t know how to use this drive yet, that’s why there’s an INSTALL DISC.  Durrrrr.)

Blu-Ray fanboys are pretty funny, by the way.  “But HD-DVD is obsolete!”  Really?  I must have been imagining that I was watching King Kong in HD last night.  Figment of my freakin’ imagination, that’s for sure.  Look, HD-DVD didn’t magically stop working just because eight movie studios decreed that “the market” (read: themselves) decided that Blu-Ray was better.  Fact: $400, plus $30 per movie,  is too much for me to pay.  $50 for an HD-DVD player with a ton of clearanced movies for less than $15… now you’re talking.  My add-on will work fine until combo players become cheap enough, or Blu-Ray becomes cheap enough and I rip my HD-DVDs and re-burn to Blu-Ray.  It’s 50 lousy bucks, there’s not a whole lot of risk here.

However, I reserve the right to change my opinion if the HD-DVD player blows up my house or says mean things about my mom.  THEN the gloves are off.

This is pretty neat and I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.  Turns out that there’s a hotkey combo to select a specific tab in Firefox. This is really handy for me when using webapps like Meebo that I shuffle back and forth from.

Select Specific Tab with Keyboard Hotkey in Firefox :: the How-To Geek

I was especially amused to read this after the experience I went through with Dell back in January. I’ll sum up my post from the comment thread here:

I’m glad to see these crooks get slapped around a bit after the experience I had when I decided to order a new laptop back in January. I’m especially pleased that it’s happening in my home state.

I didn’t qualify for Dell’s “interest-free” line of credit. I’d love to know what one actually has to do to qualify for this mythical interest-free credit, because my credit score is outstanding - but that’s just a minor annoyance compared to what I went through to cancel the unwanted line of credit for which I *was* approved, the one that offered the low, low rate of 22.74% APR. (Yeah, can’t imagine why I didn’t want to keep that line of credit - what a deal.) It took three phone calls to finally get this done, including one with a liar who assured me that the account would never be activated because I didn’t make a purchase. (The card arrived in the mail a couple days after that conversation.)

Then they refused to send me confirmation that the account was closed because I didn’t accept the terms and conditions. So…. you won’t tell me you’ve closed an account unless I accept the terms, which would in fact mean I want the account open. Um, OK. My brain still hurts over that one. Anyway, once I started using initials such as “BBB” I got the confirmation letter I was looking for.

Buy a Dell if you must, but stay far, far away from their credit department unless you consider sanity to be overrated. Dell lost my business with this BS.

Oh, and I still don’t have a new laptop.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this situation. I wonder if I might potentially be involved in a settlement. I’d consider that a fair trade for the slight hit my credit score likely took as a result of this fiasco.

Since buying a new router the other day, I decided to muck around with streaming video from my PC to my Xbox 360. It used to be that you needed a PC running Windows Media Center for this, but as of last fall you could use a Windows XP-based PC with the right software - for example, Windows Media Player 11 or Microsoft’s Zune software. In theory, one could download various TV shows and video clips from the Internet and enjoy playback on a 360.

Except there’s a bit of a drawback: the 360 only understands the Windows Media Video (WMV) file format and codecs. Occasionally, I find myself needing to download a show from the Internet when my somewhat buggy DirecTV DVR messes up, and those aren’t WMV. Furthermore, video conversion is generally a pain.

Enter TVersity. It’s an Xbox 360-compatible media server with the ability to transcode video from almost any format to WMV on the fly. No need to pre-convert anything - I just call up a video via the 360, wait a few seconds, and bam, I’m sitting on my couch and enjoying it on my TV instead of trying to watch it while uncomfortably huddled around my computer monitor.

Combined with this handy DirecTV-Xbox 360 remote hack, watching video files just got a whole lot more painless for me. Huzzah!

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?

I haven’t written for over a month, so I guess I should put something here, right?

I just got back late last week from a trip to the Oracle Openworld conference in San Francisco. It was my first trip to the Bay Area, and I took a couple hundred pictures, some of which I may even put up later. I also got to visit my godparents, who live in Sacramento and made the 1.5 hour drive to see me. All in all, a fun trip but a tiring one - walking up and down those hills is quite a workout!

I still haven’t gotten around to installing those new hard drives yet. I tried Vista for a little bit, but due to some weirdness I’m going back to XP until I feel a bit braver. Application support, at least for the apps I use, isn’t quite there yet. For example, I can’t even run Firefox unless it’s as admin. So I’ve been researching an unattended Windows install CD that integrates the latest patches and drivers for things like RAID - that way, if I need to attempt the install multiple times, I can save myself some work. I need to hurry up on this, as the wife has been itching to be able to use iTunes and Photoshop again.

Hockey season is upon us, and with the Sabres getting off to a 11-0-1 start, I have nothing to complain about. We picked a good year to get season tickets Now if only I could afford a new jersey…

‘Tis all for now - I keep telling myself I need to stay on top of this blogging thing. Who knows if I’ll ever achieve that.

So I was in Vegas this past week, and the last day we were there, my wife’s uncle says “Hey, if you’re looking for something to do, we could always go to Fry’s.”

They had Hitachi 500GB SATA hard drives, normally $229.99, on sale for $169.99 with a mail-in rebate to bring the price down to $129.99.  I bought 2.  They also had a 4GB flash drive, normally $169.99, on sale for $89.99 with another MIR to bring the price down to $69.99.

So much for keeping the credit card balances down.  Damn you Fry’s!