Other Peoples Drama
Yesterday my wife and I went on an adventure to Northwest Arkansas. We have a deep sense of nostalgia about the Fayetteville area, because I guess it was one of the first towns we knew nothing about and wandered around together in. This is a thing we like to do, go to a new area without any real warning and see what all we can find. Combine this with the fact that my wife has a really awesome cousin in the area, and it is a location we try and get to as often as possible. For whatever reason however it had been a few years since we had managed to make the trek. I mean its not extremely far, but it still ends up being roughly a two hour journey from our home… so something we don’t exactly undertake lightly.
One of the coolest things about going up there is hanging out at our cousins place of business. She is a tattoo artist of some renown and the shop is always an interesting place. It gives us a window into lifestyles that are just somewhat hard to fathom. I guess I’ve always thought it was important to expose yourself to other ways of thinking, but there are times that I just sit back and cannot quite follow the logic that lead down some of the paths. I mean the family is awesome, but the shroud of drama that surrounds it is one part really bad luck and one part less than stellar decisions made in the midst of that bad luck. But what I love is just how valiantly they fight back against whatever circumstances they are thrown into. While constantly in struggle mode, you can feel the love and the life that they embrace.
The Future Is Now
Northwest Arkansas is known for a lot of things, but probably the biggest is that Bentonville is the headquarters of the Wal-mart corporation. As such you see some interesting machinations take root there that will likely filter out into the rest of the country. Yesterday while roaming around town we saw something interest, a Wal-Mart Pickup Grocery. In essence it looks like a non-descript warehouse building with a series of bright green drive in stalls similar to a drive in restaurant like Sonic. The idea apparently is that you order your groceries online, and then pull into the stall and punch in some code letting the folks inside know you are there. At which point they bring out your groceries and help you load them into your vehicle.
I have wanted exactly this same concept for years… and I am pumped to see that it even exists in a test market. For years I have wanted to be able to do my grocery shopping online and simply pull up to the store and load what I just bought. I really hate everything about grocery shopping, from the journey from cold to humid within each store, to the slow moving shoppers, to the desperate for small talk and validation cashiers. I mean I try my best to be pleasant through the average shopping trip, and keep from biting anyone’s head off… but it is a frustration that I would be more than happy to abandon. The prevalence of self checkout lanes greatly improved my shopping experience, and this is just the next step. The only thing that would improve it beyond this is maybe if robots delivered my groceries.
Playstation TV
Today I am wrapped up in my fuzzy little cocoon on the sofa, with cats napping beside me. After two days of heavy activity, I am ready to just be mostly comatose today. I got home late enough last night that I didn’t really get much chance to do anything. I did take a bit and hook up my Playstation TV and so far the results are mixed. I feel like I need to probably hard wire my ps4 into my network, so that only one of the two units is using wireless. Playing Destiny there was a noticeable lag to the gameplay. I mean it is probably no worse than when playing on the vita, but playing on a tiny screen with already awkward controls seems to make it less noticeable. I didn’t experience any of the graphical glitches that Pete Smith on G+. I am hoping if I hardwire my PS4 that it will help out the latency a bit.
I essentially need another HDMI hub downstairs as essentially I had to unplug my Chromecast to plug in the PSTV. The other thing that I guess I was not prepared for is that I would need another Vita memory card. So I have an HDMI hub and another memory stick on order that should arrive tomorrow. The base unit only has 1 gig of storage so there really was not much that I could even download to play on the unit. I will likely keep the chromecast hooked up until I get the rest of the bits to connect things up. Thankfully it recognized my Dual Shock 4 without any issue, and was able to play using that. The only problem I see there is that the PSTV doesn’t seem to take advantage of the touchpad at all, which makes some of the “Vita” interactions a bit awkward like the motion to “swipe away” a current application to close it is performed by holding down a button as the corner slowly peels away. I think once I get used to it, I will enjoy it more as it will extend the PS4 to yet another television.