Xbox None

I am trying my best to wake up and get amped for the day.  This is going to be an extremely busy one.  We are getting our new shiny faster internet, whole home DVR, and the new furniture delivered.  However each one of these is going to involve quite a bit of prep work from me to make happen.  So while I took a day off to accomplish all of this, it will most definitely be a working day off.

Working Vacation

I am working on finishing my coffee at the moment, and I might end up having a second before too much longer.  I need that caffieney goodness to make it through the various sundry things on the radar this morning.  First I need to go to the three rooms they are installing the DVRs in, and pick up the area surrounding the television/cable boxes.  Next I need to prepare my wireless router to accept the new information… disconnect it and move it to the loft where it will be as soon as they run a cable jack out there.

After the cable is installed and I have interwebs again…  I need to start working on prepwork for the furniture movers.  I need to take a load of stuff we gathered up to goodwill, and this load of old printer toner cartridges somewhere.  Most of them are for printers we no longer own.  My hope is to be able to wheel and deal and trade all the resalable cartridges for one new full backup for our current printer.  I have no clue if this will actually work.

Finally when I get home I need to load a metal table that we used beside our current sofa into the back of my jeep, as we are delivering it to someone on Sunday.  This will free up that corner of the room and keep it out of the way of the movers.  Next I need to break down the ferret playpen, and stowe them in their main cage for the day.  Then I will move the current sofa over against the wall the playpen was up against… and finally hopefully…  after locking the cats up in our bedroom…  move in the new sectional.

Then tonight when my wife gets home, we will move the sofa out to the pile in the back yard…  call the Junkman and have them haul it all away.  This is the plan…  but right now it feels completely daunting.  I know I will make it work, but it is going to end up being a pretty stressful day overall.  I hope everything goes smoothly in the process.  My goal is not to disconnect my current internet until everything is really ready to go.

Additionally I have a few “bonus missions” should I be able to do them as well.  We really need to change out the toilet tank apparatus in the upstairs bathroom, because it is taking forever to fill up after flushing.  I also have a shelf unit that my dad made in shop class, that I intend to hang above the media cabinet in the loft to store nifty things like assembled LEGO sets.  But quite honestly… when I was thinking about these things I was not feeling quite as stressed as I am now.  I do not thing this will be a leisurely day by any definition of the word.

Xbox None

 

So I feel like with my recent console resurgence… I would not be a proper blogger if I did not at least talk about the super exciting reveal of the Xbox One.  I am saying super and exciting with as much sarcasm as I can possibly muster… I think I had to go down to the store and buy an extra sarcasm booster to be able to reach these levels properly.  Everyone essentially expected the next generation of console gaming… and what we got instead is “Microsoft TV” in the form of a voice and motion activated media pc.

The big problem I have with the release is that I really do not care about broadcast television, nor do I care about sports in any fashion.  I feel like everything shown in that video was direct marketed at someone other than me…  someone apparently with silly amounts of money to spend on a glorified cable box.  I realize that I am not the key demographic for console gaming… but based on the presentation it seems that neither are gamers.

The funny thing is that I am not extremely surprised.  Right now in my newly christened gaming loft, I have a ps3 and a newer Xbox 360 250 gig model.  While I like playing the games on the Xbox, and I like the controller so much better…  the overall gaming experience is much better on the ps3.  Primarily PlayStation Plus is playing on a completely different level than Xbox Live Gold.  The two are not even comparable…  the plus program gives you an instant collection of 12 games, and then new games added regularly as old ones roll out of the package.  The Xbox gives you the ability to play games online… which the ps3 already had by default.

I doubt I will be getting either console system at launch, but right now I am far more interested in the PlayStation 4 than I am in this voice automated channel switcher.  The biggest breakthrough that they announced is group Skype calls from your living room.  I have to say this is a really cool feature…  that I would never actually use.  I had the concept of video chat, hell simply calling someone on the phone causes more social anxiety to well up in me than I can imagine.  The thought of willfully video chatting with someone is just beyond me.

Additionally… I find it creepy as shit that the Xbox One is essentially a remote surveillance box… that will more than likely cost us $600 to be monitored by.  The fact that the kinect camera is always on, even when the unit is off… waiting for the command to turn it on…  kind of freaks me out a bit.  I seriously wonder how long it will be before someone figures out how to hijack that feed and spy on people.  I am trying not to tiptoe too deeply into tinfoil hat territory… but Microsoft isn’t really known for their digression… especially in the post Bill Gates era.

Anyways long story and a lot of rambling short… this really is not a device for me at this moment.  They debuted a gaming console, but didn’t really talk much about gaming.  It does some interesting things, but I am bored already with broadcast television, and somehow gamifying it is not going to make it suddenly interesting.  I am allergic to watching sports, so the D&D for jocks angle… aka Fantasy Football is not going to do anything for me at all.  As stated above, neither is the video conferencing option…  which I find creepy.  The only killer feature possibly would be to postage stamp my game, and continue playing while my wife watches a show.  However they never actually showed that, and I question if you can minimize the game window instead of a video stream/internet browser.

Wrapping Up

I need to get up and start moving again.  I have a long list of things to accomplish and a finite time window to do it in.  I hope I survive the day, and this evening I have wonderfully fast internet with a decent ping time.  Additionally I hope I do not die from allergies, as I keep going into massive sneezing fits.  I hope you all have an awesome day, and that you also get accomplished everything on your list.