Why the Wii?

Remember the Power Glove for Nintendo? No?! Well for those of you that don’t, it looked something like this:

It was for Nintendo… and it totally sucked. My brother and I got this elaborate piece of crap most likely after begging our parents to buy it. Although it was a long time ago, I remember waving my hand around trying to get Mario to jump and becoming incredibly frustrated by his non-responsive diet-needing ass. Was it Mario’s fault? Of course not, perhaps it was due to the fact that you had to be wired like Robocop to get the damn thing to work. That flashy ad above is great and all, but look at this thing:

“The glove was somewhat difficult to use; in order for the glove to register with the ultrasonic sensors, one had to keep their knuckles pointing at them at all times. In addition, since each finger had 4 positions, it is difficult to have disparate fingers in different positions simultaneously. Thus, while it was possible to control 16 different states simultaneously, most people have difficulty keeping the ring and index fingers straight, while bending the middle finger. [-wikipedia]” Somewhat difficult to use? Somewhat… try impossible. Unless you are a master finger pupeteer you ain’t getting shit done with this thing.

Now Nintendo has been hard at work developing the Wii. Anyone who has heard about the Wii knows about it’s unique motion-sensitive remote. Umm… is it just me or is this thing the Power Glove all over again? Sure technology has come a long way and it’s wireless, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that motion-sensing remotes aren’t for traditional console gaming. I really cannot see how this remote is going to make a game that much more fun. I’m sorry Nintendo, but do you really expect me to stand up in front of my TV and play virtual paintbrush or a thrilling round of golf with that thing? Just think, you too can look almost as cool as these kids:

The remote will appeal to kids between the ages of 5-11… anyone older than that… I have a hard time believing they will be standing in front of their TV for hours on end battling through Red Steel trying to make themselves think they really have a sword in their hands. However, I have yet to actually try the Wii’s remote, so I’m mostly speculating here… it is Nintendo after all, hopefully the Wii’s remote won’t suck as bad as the Power Glove.

Prey Demo

I’ve been reading for weeks about people becoming frustrated waiting for the Prey demo to be released for XBox 360. Well alas, as one of my favorite sites, XBox 360 Fanboy pointed out… the demo has been released. It’s 1.17 GB’s and the title (PREY Singleplayer and Multipla…) leads me to believe the demo will include multiplayer, which should result in quite a bit of playtime. Enjoy the holiday weekend in multiplayer mode.

Vista Beta 2

In case you live in a cave somewhere and hadn't heard yet, Microsoft recently released a beta of Windows Vista to the public. Of course I immediately went to the Vista website and downloaded the 3.2 GB ISO. Being the first few hours that it was out, I figured the Microsoft servers were probably being overwhelmed as it took me a while to get the download running smoothly. The next morning my download was complete and I burned a DVD+RW of the ISO and proceeded to install the OS. My first attempt to install Vista was on an extra external USB drive I had sitting around that I don't really use. I wasn't sure if it would work as my computer did support booting an external drive, but it was a beta version after all.

Sure enough installing to the external USB drive didn't work out, so I installed it on my second internal hard drive. The install went smoothly after that and I am currently writing this blog from Windows Vista. To be safe I left Windows XP on my machine and now am successfully dual-booting (Lifehacker has a good tutorial on how to install Vista as a dual-boot). Although I've been running Vista for about a week I haven't expierenced any major issues. The only hiccup occured after Vista installed, I had to get my CD for the drivers to my wireless network card. The flashy appearance of Vista is appealing, but it's certainly nothing to get overly-excited about in my opinion.

So far my favorite thing about Vista is Media Player 11, but you can download that (also in beta) for XP on Microsoft's website. I've never really been too big a fan of Windows Media Player due to the fact that I don't like how it arranges my music in Media Player itself as well as on my hard drive, but I think they got it right this time. The Artist or Album view is great:

For those of you who aren't nerdy enough to know about Vista or have seen the screenshots that are nearly everywhere, check out this website for some screencasts.

And to prove I'm not the only geek out there, the Vista download that was made available to the public was 'the biggest software download in history'. In fact, if you check out Alexa.com, windowsvista.com has a 200,000% increase. That is absurd, see for yourself:

The Beauty of RSS

I may never need to go to another website again (OK, so that's exaggerating). RSS is quickly changing the way in which the web can be navigated and how quickly people can be informed. For those people like myself who have an above average knowledge of internet-related technology, we already know and use RSS on a daily basis. But for those of you who are still in the dark, let me see if I can help clarify what it is and why it is so freggin' wonderful.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. If a site has an RSS 'feed' you can use certain programs or web applications to subscribe to those feeds. If you look closely on many of your favorite websites, you will see a link that says RSS or XML, or perhaps notice one of these images: This indicates that the site (or section of the site you are reading) has an RSS feed. You may say, so what? Well, let me explain…

Like the nerd I am I always must have the latest and greatest software, so I recently downloaded Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2. Outlook 2007 supports subscribing to RSS Feeds which has really changed the way I get news from websites. To the right is the RSS section of my Navigation Pane in Outlook 2007. As you can see I have added numerous sites which I frequently visit. What this means is when a site posts a new article or gets updated, it appears as a new message in one of my RSS folders (or wherever you specifiy). What this means is I spend less and less time navigating to my favorite sites to see if they have recently been updated.

Outlook 2007 is still in Beta after all and isn't running 100% smoothly so I suggest you try using your own program. There are many other alternatives to reading RSS feeds, some are standalone applications that run as a program on your computer while others are web-based. Here is some guy that lists a bunch of 'em. In each program or website there will be a simple way to add the RSS or XML links from your favorite sites.

Want to know more? Click here to get another really good overview of RSS.

*You can even create your own feeds now without being too big a nerd. Feedburner lets users create their own RSS feeds and spares them the technical detail of writing XML.

How Small We Are…

One of my greatest interests is Astronomy and the Universe. I remember as a younger boy my grandfather had a telescope, but I never really thought much of it. During my high school years I started watching shows on the Universe and my interest slowly started to rise. Throughout college I took some Astronomy courses and started to realize just how vast the Universe is. The majority of us go about our days living our lives and never really consider how small and insignificant we really are. Here is an animation that may give you a slight understanding: www.micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10

Our visible universe (how far we can see from Earth in any direction) is 13.7 billion light years. The speed of light is 670,616,629.384 miles per hour. Why do I mention mph? Because that's a term we use everyday… it's a speed we can relate to… we are supposed to drive 55mph, modern airliners fly at around 500mph, the fastest jet man has made (SR-71) hit a record just above 2,000mph. If we were to fly in an airliner to the edge of our visible universe (which by the way is 91,874,478,225,608,000,000 miles away) it would take 20,975,908,270,686.7 years (20 trillion years!). The size of the visible universe is incomprehensible to the human mind. These distances we cannot wrap our minds around.

The next time you look up at the night sky, remember you are not seeing stars as they are now, you are seeing them as they were years ago. The closest stars to us are about 4 light years away, in other words they are so far away it takes light (traveling at the insane speed I mention above) 4 years to reach us. Even our own Sun, the closest star to us, is so far away it takes light about 8 minutes to travel to us. If the Sun vanished now at this instant, we would still have light for 8 minutes.

There are so many other mind boggling things in the Universe, such things as neutron stars, black holes, gamma bursts, etc, which keep my mind spinning when trying to comprehend it.

Well Hello…

In an effort to make my life more exciting I've decided to start sharing some of my brilliant knowledge with the world. I currently work for a relatively small company in which I play the role of Programmer, Database Administrator, Web Developer, and Graphic Designer… to name a few. The programs I most frequently use throughout the course of the day are Dreamweaver, Access, Photoshop, SQL Server, and Outlook. I have a strong interest in programming and web development which leads me to spend a good majority of my time 'fiddling' with code. What really gains my interest is seeing if I can get the computer to do something that will make my life easier. Where this mostly ends up taking me is somewhere relatively geeky… either searching for code online that I can use at my job to make our work more efficient or attempting to innovate and come up with my own solutions. On top of this I prefer to design attractive interfaces… which is what led me to learn how to use Photoshop.

Prior to finishing college with a major in Computer Science (what else) I came up with some extra cash doing web design. I taught myself HTML and eventually was designing Flash websites from the ground up. One thing I am proud of is the fact that the majority of the computer-related knowledge I have is from teaching myself. College gave me a good background in object-oriented programming (OOP) and other important concepts such as algorithm efficiency, but most of the knowledge I have is through my own trial and error. For example, when I grew tired of programming in C and C++ and wanted to design a window based application as opposed to a console command line app, I taught myself how to program in C# using the Microsoft .NET framework.

Anyways, hopefully this will be a good outlet for me in the future where I can share some of my computer knowledge with the rest of you. After all, today is my 25th birthday, perhaps it is time I do something productive