Blog Features

This will be the first blog post I type up from my new sectional.  While we have had it since thursday night, life has been pretty crazy and not allowed me much time to just chill out with the laptop and get used to it.  It is definitely comfortable, but I also sit at a much different angle which is taking some getting used to.  Right now I am trying to wake up while recovering from the allergy overload that was last night.

Chain Smokers

My allergies are going haywire because we attended a “welcome to summer” cookout held by some of my wife’s teacher friends.  They have this super peaceful plot of land… but it is what feels like hundreds of miles from civilization.  Okay in reality it is only like 10 miles, but when you are going there you have to drive through a whole lot of nothing.  There are times I think I would enjoy living in the middle of nowhere, but then I realize that I like not having to travel more than a few minutes to get to things.

Hanging out in nature always has serious adverse effects on my sinuses, but overall it was a good time.  I am always conflicted with gatherings.  Leading up to actually going I start to dread having to interact with people, but when I actually get there I warm up and enjoy myself.  I spent most of the night trading quips back and forth with two of the hostesses college aged children.

That was the only really odd thing about the evening.  Overall there were more college kids there than teachers, as I am guessing the cookout was also doubling as the sons birthday party of sorts.  The food was excellent and I have completely gone off my diet for the day.  The madness of Thursday probably made up for it, I am sure I burned a ton of calories as I am pretty sure I climbed upstairs and downstairs a good 50 times.

We purposefully sat up wind of the fire, but due to all the rain the wood was smoking horribly.  As the evening went on, my eyes were burning and my lungs started to feel a bit icky even though I had not actually been in the stream of the smoke at all.  I feel sorry for the people who were on the other end of the fire, because I am sure they were hurting.  All in all though the cookout was enjoyable, but we stayed far later than I had expected.

Reselling Goods

So this is going to get into some pretty controversial territory here, but I am a huge proponent of used game sales.  That said I hate Game Stop with deep seething passion and would do almost anything to see them wiped off the face of the planet.  I refuse to go into the stores anymore, because I just think everything about the company is underhanded.  I would rather wait the two days it takes for me to get an item from Amazon Prime than give them my business.  But I fully support the notion of second hand games.

In fact yesterday over lunch I picked up Blazblue, Casltevania Lords of Shadow, and Halo 3 at a local pawn shop for $7 each.  I buy most of my console games second hand, but I do so through what feels like more equitable places, namely… pawnshops, goodwill, thrift stores, flea markets and a couple of local chains…  Game Xchange and Vintage Stock.  Quite honestly most console titles are just not worth the $60 dollar new price for me, so I wait until I can pick them up in the $8-$15 dollar range.

The industry will cry fowl and complain that they are not getting their cut of the second sale… and I say… yes that is exactly how reselling goods works.  You do not deserve a second dip into the pot of game sales, you got your money the FIRST time the item changed hands.  Buying a used video  game is no different than buying a used car, or used furniture.  You do not see furniture companies getting a cut of the money when someone buys a sofa from a second hand shop, and neither should the game industry.

The issue is fundamentally that players do not want to pay what you are charging for the games.  For whatever reason most gamers do not feel that the games they are playing are worth the full price.  How does the industry fix this?  I really don’t know, but it is unfair to expect players to finance their failure to connect with the consumer and prove the value of their product.  Ultimately the game industry has to place some special value in the new purchase of their titles. 

One of the tactics I am completely fine with is offering bonus features that do not transfer with the disc when resold.  Essentially that you get a few nifty DLC items that are actually meaningful to the players… like extra levels or playable characters…  that do not transfer after the initial unlock.  Then allow players you have purchased your game second hand, to pay $10/$15 to unlock those features as well.  The game industry in no way deserves a cut of selling that physical game disc a second time, however I have no problem with them making a bit of money from the dlc unlocks.

The big thing regardless of the strategy is that these companies need to stop coming across as an evil empire.  Right now it feels like they are plotting nefariously to deprive us of content, so that they can line their pockets.  I realize that this is an attempt at survive, to keep funding the big development budgets that are required to produce AAA titles.  However they need to be honest and transparent about it.  I would care a lot more about the process if they just came out and said, look you get this stuff for free but we have to charge you if you buy the game used so that they can fund the next game.  Consumers do not like feeling like they are being fleeced, and based on the fact that gamers voted EA the worst company ever…  they feel like they are being fleeced.

Wrapping Up

Going to wrap up, I have rattled on about the issue long enough.  I normally don’t engage in controversial titles on the weekend, but because of how busy we have been I just have not really spent much time gaming.  I don’t foresee that changing much this weekend as we have a bunch of other things to do.  We need to move the old sofa out into the junk pile, clean the house, and maybe move my wife out of her classroom today.  All I really want to do is collapse, but I am sure I will soldier on.  I hope you all have a great day and can actually relax a bit and enjoy the weekend.

Yesterday was quite the ordeal, but I survived more or less and everything got accomplished that had to.  I completed almost none of my bonus missions, but the main tasks got way more involved that I had originally planned.  There were a lot of ups and downs and the whole thing was a ton more stressful than I realized.  I am guessing that is why both of my posts yesterday were more than a little ranty.

Juggling Sofas

Basically when I got up yesterday morning, I crawled upstairs and blogged as normal… then at roughly 7 am I started in on the various tasks that needed to get accomplished.  I started by picking up each of the rooms that the cable guy would have to visit, and making sure he had a path clear of debris.  The actual sequence of events is a bit hazy at the moment, but I proceeded a long until about 8:30… then took a break to go get a sausage roll from QuikTrip.

I tore down the ferret playpen downstairs, and dumped anything that was cloth in the washing machine.  I removed the water bottle and feed cup from the panels, and folded them completely for the first time since we originally set the pen up years ago.  After cleaning the area and sweeping up the left over food and other “bits”… these are animals after all… I cleared a big swath of the living room floor that would eventually be used as swap space.

Where we left it the previous night is that when the furniture movers called and were on their way I would move the slate table up against the TV and swing the old sofa over towards the wall where the ferret pen was set up, trying to leave a walkway.   All of this sounded fairly reasonable since the schedule was that the cable would be here between 10 and 12 and that the furniture folks would be here between 2 and 4.  I thought I had this all planned out nicely so that we would not run into any issues.

Mister Late meet Mister Punctual

So I don’t want this to come off like I am in bitching in any way, but around 11:30 I got a call from Cox stating that their installer was running behind at a previous location, and that they wanted to make sure that it was okay that he would not likely be there until 12:15.  I said it was fine since I had taken the day off to do multiple things.  Turns out he didn’t actually make it until closer to 1.  Still fine, because I expected the furniture movers would not be here at 2 on the dot.

Turns out that our cable was in worse shape than we realize.  The coax we have is a little over 10 years old, and as a result his install call turned quickly into a repair call.  He went above and beyond the call of duty and essentially re-ran cable to all the rooms that already had a pop.  Additionally he did new pops in my office and in the loft… initially we were only going to have it run to the loft, but he said since he was running to one room in a row it was just as easy to run to the other.

This of course took a long time, and as he was starting to wrap up… just getting to the “mess with cable boxes to make them talk” phase I get a call from the furniture movers.  They are running on schedule and will be there shortly after 2.  I went through a mad rush, trying to do a bunch of things at once.  I moved the table in the livingrooom closer to the tv, but still tried to leave the nice guy room to fiddle with our cable box.  I moved swung the couch around and moved it to the wall basically creating an interesting new seating area.

The Missing Tabby

The next task was the corral the cats in the bedroom.  The problem is… I could not find any of them… ANYWHERE.  Apparently the banging and movement of this strange man through our house freaked them all out.  I found a couple of them up under the bed, so I went ahead and shut off the bedroom hoping that the third was also hiding.  I asked the cable guy and he said he saw the tabby run into the bedroom and duck under the bed when he went in there to hook up the cable box.  Fitting the MO of a cat freaked out… I was fairly confident she would still be in there…  but all the while worried that someone had ducked out the door or up into the attic.

The furniture movers arrive and thank us for all the prep work and clearing… because they rarely if ever have a blank space to move the furniture into.  They proceed to bring in all these giant furniture Lego blocks, attempting to set them in the order we had wanted to place them.  After doing so… they linked each one to the next via these weird metal tabs and slots along the base of each unit.  When all was said and done, we had one big piece of furniture cobbled together out of the little blocks.

The funny thing is, that they were so efficient that they were long gone by the time that the cable guy and I were doing the rundown of the new features of our whole home DVR.  I really considered trying to pay them extra to haul the old sofa into the backyard and throw it on the junk pile… but I just could not bring myself to do it.  For whatever reason it felt a little shifty to me, to be offering them money on the side to do something not originally in the game plan.

After the furniture guys had left, and I verified with the cable guy that he would not be needing the front door open for long periods of time… I went ahead and opened back up the bathroom and bedroom.  Sure enough the various cats started making their way out of their temporary cage, but this time they made a beeline upstairs and hid there.  However it did allow me to start breathing again, since I saw each of them as they whizzed by.

The Toner Collection

In all the recent cleaning we have amassed this huge collection of spent toner cartridges.  The two of us greatly prefer the speed and efficiency of laser printers, and as a result we have owned a bunch of different models over the years.  So in cleaning we have accumulated a pile of toner cartridges belonging to four different printers…  only one of which we actually still own.  We traditionally get our toner from Cartridge World, so I was hoping to work out some kind of swap. 

I packed up the house, verified that the cats were still okay and in hiding and went on the mission to unload toner cartridges and drop another small load off at goodwill.  I made it to Cartridge World as it began to rain.  I went inside and talked to the little man for a bit, finding out that unfortunately they were not willing to play ball… and that they considered their program an exchange, and that technically they still own the cartridges…  based on the fact that I had 10 in my car I begged to differ.  I did not want to lug them somewhere else however, so he said they would definitely recycle them… which was good enough for me.

I started on my way to Goodwill, and had gotten to the corner to turn down towards our house when I noticed blue and red flashing lights in my rearview window.  One of my tasks for the day was to renew my expired tag.  However my neighbor who is a tag agent, stopped by as she was heading to work…and chastised me for not just giving my insurance to her and letting her take care of it.  So I was super relieved of not having to weave a trip to the Tag Agency into my already busy day…. but thought nothing about it.

For weeks I have not wanted to drive my jeep on the weekends, because my theory has been that with an expired tag, so long as it was during rush hour… I would not likely get stopped.  But I knew the moment I drove my jeep around town at any period OTHER than rush hour… I would get busted.  Sure enough, today was the first time I had driven my jeep other than rush hour situations… and sure enough I got pulled over and handed a ticket for an expired tag.  The good of it is, that since I really have already renewed my tag at this point… I just have to go down to the court clerk and show proof of my tag.

The bad news is that they work Monday through Friday 9 am to 5 pm.  So getting there will be a juggling act, but the alternative is to wait until June 27th and have to show up in traffic court.  I would rather keep from having to go to court, so I will figure out a way even if it is to take a weirdly offset lunch hour and come deal with it.  Unfortunately I have not been able to hook up with my neighbor again since yesterday…  and I still have no 2014 sticker on my tag.  I am carrying around the tag citation, hoping that if another officer pulls me over they will take pity on the fact that I have already been busted for it once.

Real Live Internet

It is roughly 3:30 when I drop off the load at Goodwill and make it home.  At this point I have not eaten anything since about 8:30 and am ravenous.  So I hit the fridge and cobble together a feast of leftover spanish rice and chicken alfredo.  While I am sure this frustrated my wife, the very first thing I wanted to do is go up to my office and play around with the internet.  While I love all of the changes, this is the one that will impact me the most from this point on.

While those numbers may not look special to some of you, you have to understand that previously on our best day we had 3 meg down and 256 kbits up.  We were constantly stomping all over each other as we tried to use the web.  If my wife was uploading photos to her blog, then my ping in a game went to absolute shit.  If I was patching one of my games, she couldn’t surf the web.  Forget the concept of using netflix AND the web or a game at the same time.  Now we have enough bandwidth to comfortably do multiple things at the same time.

It is amazing how much faster games patch with this new connection.  As a test, I fired up SWTOR… since I had not played it since before the Rise of the Hutts release.  It took about 30 minutes to download the patch, whereas in the past that literally would have been something I had to fire up when I went to bed and let it run all day while I was at work.  I feel like we have just left the dark ages and entered the renaissance.  When I finally filtered downstairs and set my laptop up… the first thing I did was fire up something in netflix, just to see how well it worked.  Sure enough I was able to stream netflix, while patching the secret world and eventually logging in and playing it… all the while maintaining a sub 100 ping.  So much happy about this change.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap up, since I have almost run out of time.  Basically the long and short is… I am really happy with the internet change.  I am so far happy with the whole home dvr…  just going to take some getting used to and learning where all the buttons are.  I am happy with the new sofa, but it feels extremely weird, and I am going to have to live with it a bit to find the most optimal way to use my laptop.  Last night I was too damned tired and sore to really use anything optimally, as I felt like I was just going through the motions.

We ended up in bed around 9… maybe earlier… because when my wife said she was ready for bed, there was absolutely no hesitation in me joining her.  I am still sore as hell from all the juggling of things, and still more than a little freaked about all the changes.  I do not handle change of any kind very well…  even if it is really good change.  I feel like the cats are in the same boat as me, considering they all seem a little freaked out.  I hope you guys have a great day, and if I can’t say it before then… I hope you have a great memorial day weekend.  May you be able to embrace the change in your life easier than I can.

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.