Moving

I've been in the middle of a move for the past few days, and I finally finished unpacking enough things to at least get a computer out. We don't have any internet however, so I'm forced to sit at Starbucks on my laptop hahaha. (Am I a hipster yet?)

I feel like I'm starting to slip away from the blog community, but I promise that as soon as my internet comes back I will find my friends and we can pickup where we left off. :]

So, have any of you ever moved? Have you had a friend move away?

Who was pizza???? Slice question.

So me and a friend picked up a pizza from Walmart the other day (don't hate, those are some good pizzas). We were sitting in his kitchen just enjoying our food when he noticed this on the back of the box:
We could not for the life of us let this go. 9 slices per serving? Who in the world would take the effort to cut their pizza into 9 slices? You would literally have to take a protractor and measure 40 degree slices.

I made a little sketch on his white board to see the minimum amount of effort it would take to make 9 even slices. Wow, look how easy it was and how accurate I was!

Here, I've added a diagram of how any regular person cuts their pizza:



So tell me, how do you cut your pizza? Tell me it's not 9 slices...

Dial-up

Oooooh boy, who remembers this? I found a video online recently (I'll post it at the bottom) of a recording of the old dial-up sound. It felt like a blast from the past and I immediately remembered trying to use AOL on my Windows 95 computer. This was the pinnacle of our technology of the time and everyone was fascinated by all the web pages and interesting content.

The reason I'm posting this really is because I was having a conversation the other day with a younger friend of mine, and I had to actually explain to her what Dial-up was. I had to explain that you couldn't use the phone and be online at the same time, and that you had to sit through a minute of jumbled noise just to be "online". Downloading a 30 second movie clip would take well over an hour. How old do you feel knowing that there are people alive now, and will be born in the future that won't recognize this wonderful sound?

Jailbreaking / Modding, Opinions?

There are a lot of very smart people out there today, and thanks to this mysterious and incomprehensible connection between your screen and mine we are able to interact with them. Among those people are those known as "hackers" or "modders" and I mean the actual people who design them, not the thousands of people who use them. Companies like Sony are starting to have these raging campaigns against these people on the grounds that they're losing money to the people who pirate using these mods. On one hand I agree, if I were in their position, I would be angry too, but since I am also a consumer, one with minimal funds mind you, I am also on the opposing side. I think it's safe to assume, now with Bittorrent and the such running rampant, that downloading these games is now comparable to downloading music.

I've heard both sides of the argument. I've heard the companies complain that they're losing money and that the industry is going under, and I've heard from consumers that downloading is safe because they wouldn't have been able to afford the games anyway, so no sale is lost. I understand it's an argument that's been beaten to death a million times, so there's really nothing I can say about it to add any new insight. But does all modding have to really be bad?

I've seen a lot of home-brew applications on my Wii and on my PSP that did things that they were never intended to be able to do. They're able to emulate old PC games like Doom, and they're able to become things like Alarm Clocks and Torrent Clients, Game emulators for previous systems, the list goes on. If the companies didn't fight the modding community so harshly and actually embraced it, couldn't they work together to create better devices with more accessibility?

Open Source is the way to the future I believe, that's why browsers like Firefox are so great, and even other programs like Open Office, Operating Systems like Ubuntu (Which I use on my Sony Vaio laptop, It's great, user friendly, and 100% free), Audio recording and editing with Audacity, Photo manipulation with Gimp, the list totally goes on and on. People really need to start working together in every way possible to have as much innovation as we can. I believe that's how we can get to the technological future that we see in movies.

History of Online Gaming

The video game motif seems to really be popular, so I think I'll stick with it for a little while longer. I'm going to talk about my personal history with online gaming as I think it could have been a common one for many. I played my first MMO after meeting a kid in an AOL chat room (Who else remembers when those were the shit?) He told me about "Runescape" which I read as "Run escape" and I was like, what is this bizarre game? I was interested at first, as I had never experienced this type of game before so everything was interesting. I got my mining up to like level 15 and I could never ever find the furnace. Good times.

I had a group of friends who would always play the same games so we could play with each other, and we were finally getting sick of the Runescape craze. We stumbled upon this other game, Ragnarok Online. It was completely different from Runescape, there was literally zero focus on useless skills like Herblore and Woodcutting and a lot more focus on action and graphics. This game was a lot of fun, you got to pick a class like Swordsman or Thief, and then as you leveled up you could further progress into other classes that you could choose. Some chose Crusader while others chose Knight, etc. There was a lot of flexibility, and overall it was very enjoyable.

I won't write a lot about WOW since everything that's been said about it has already been said. but we played this game afterwards. We played on the regular servers for a while, but we ended up playing on private servers for the majority of times. This game was a lot more fun without all the grinding elements.

While all this was happening, XBOX Live was still becoming a new thing. I remember going to the midnight release of Halo 2 and being so excited for the new online elements and multiplayer. This was really ground breaking at the time, and I'm pretty sure it was Halo 2 that set the matchmaking and custom game system to it's standard that games would follow even to today. I remember setting up XBOX Live as being a bitch too, it wasn't as easy as it is now with our wireless internet. Our router of course had to be 2 floors down from where the XBOX was, so it was always an adventure trying to hook it up.

How were your first experiences with online games? I know everyone has at least played one.

Controller Design

Someone brought up the horrible design of the Nintendo 64 controller and I had to laugh. As a Kid I always used to hold the two outer grips and extend my thumb over the gap to use the joystick. I realize now that that is horribly wrong and I wonder how I ever hit the Z button.

I'm not talking purly about game systems, because there are a load of things that have fallen pray to horrible controller design, TVs, DVD players. How many of you have 20 remotes for every single thing hooked up.. because I know I always have to explain to whoever comes over to only use the black controller or you'll mess up the sound system.

I like this controller design for the original ps3 controller, to quote the Angry Video Game Nerd, "What were they thinking?" This doesn't even look comfortable. Never mind playing a game of COD on it! It reminds me of the original XBOX controllers actually. Look at this mess, I only knew one friend with hands big enough to even fit this controller, and that was a big reason I put off buying an XBOX in the first place. It wasn't untill they released the slim controllers that I even considered picking up the system.

I had an awesome XBOX too, it was the Halo edition, and it was bright green and you could see the organs and the controller said Halo instead of XBOX. It was the coolest system ever. It's got a tragic story though, my cousin tripped on the power strip and when it jerked out of the wall it blew a fuse. I sent it back to Microsoft, but instead I got back the plain Black Box that everyone had, and I was sad.


So what type of controllers have you seen/had to experience that were just horrible? Or what complicated multi-controller system have you messed up/have had friends/family mess up?

Nintendo 64 / First Post

I figure that I've got to have enough to say to provide a few minutes of insight into my thoughts every once in a while. Might as well do a blog since it's something that's always interested me. I'm also going to talk about whatever I am interested during the time of posting, whether it be music or a movie or a book that I'm reading, a game, whatever.

Anyway today I want to talk about the late and the great Nintendo 64. I grew up with this system as a kid, I remember being able to rent these from Blockbuster. That's something that's just unheard of today, where can you go out and rent an Xbox or a Playstation? Seriously, if you know that would be interesting.

Anyway, growing up we never really kept our gaming systems, we used to sell them to fund for the next upgrade, Sold our SNES for the 64, sold our 64 for the Gamecube. It's a damn shame too, because it's only now that I look back and wish that I still had them.

My friend introduced me to the Flea market near our houses and it was there that I re-picked up the black 64 box and a few games. It was like half of my childhood came flowing back, all the great memories of getting blisters from Mario party, and being enraged from dying in Super Mario 64.. and playing the disappointing Castlevania games..

I'm only playing, but really, Starfox 64, Paper Mario, Yoshi Story, these were all amazing games at the time of release, and I'm excited to hear that they're re-making a lot of them for the 3DS. That's really the selling-point for me.