Very clever use of Miis to do a scene from The Big Lebowski:

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So yesterday Elizabeth starts a game of Zelda. I didn’t think she was into those types of games, but good on her! So I aided her where I could. She self-admittedly isn’t very good at the dexterity part, but she is excellent at the puzzles.

My favorite Wii moment has to be the following. It is a Zelda spoiler (gives away a bit of the game) so I put it in the extended section of this post. You’ll need to click “Read More…” below to read it (so gamers don’t accidentally see something they didn’t want to see)…… (more…)

My brother’s rogue in WoW just hit Champion PvP and is now in full rare PvP gear. Way to go!

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So I went from going to Orycon to shopping on Fri night and Saturday, taking Elizabeth to a massage therapist as a gift for her writing a novel, to finding out I really wanted a Nintendo Wii and sitting in line at the local Fred Meyer for 8 hours to drop $409 on one, extra controllers, 2games.

This thing is SO COOL I even spent $10 when I got home on Wiibucks and bought the original Zelda for $5. It downloaded in 2 seconds over FIOS.

The long and short?

The wiiMote rocks. Score 20 out of 10. I was sweating after doing all of the wiiSports training, especially tennis and baseball. Hitting 30 balls back to back is tiring!

Zelda, “the” game I got for $50, is ok. But the graphics are kinda crappy. I mean they’re ok but because I only have the composite cable and its going through my poorly converged composite input and then my TV has a crappy upscaler, you get a lot of jaggies and stuff in the distance is hard to make out. Maybe this will get better when I can find the component cable and go 480P?

But setup was a breeze. The wii has wi-fi so it found my network and I entered my password. Buzz! Error. Hmm, so I went to the support page and it said WPA2. Hmm. Oh, I see, a blue right arrow, click that. Oh, not WEP, choose WPA2. Ok. Bingo.

It immediately downloaded two updates and reset. Nice.

I made a Mii, which is a cartoon character of yourself. Now my Mii plays the sports games etc. I also told my Muu, whom I named “Stiive,” to travel. This means he will wander to other peopel’s Wiis, and theirs will come to mine. Then I can have a parade!

I can’t use the photo stuff because none of my cameras are SD. Too bad the bluetooth the use for the wiiMotes won’t pair with my phone or Mac!

So Wii gets a 9 out of 10. If it had 1080i graphics, it would be 15 out of 10.

The controller is seriously the coolest thing I have seen from a company since the iPod. Everyone I know has to come over and play with this thing, even you Charles and Janet You see its wireless bluetooth and can sense you moving it, aiming it, etc. So you putt, bowl, punch, steer, all in mid-air. You actually have to stand up and get some exercise for some games lol.

The boxing was the most confusing. “Punching” didn’t seem to work, but moving the controllers up or down did, and side to side. Need more practice.

I picked up a party game which I call Monkey Ballz. I dunno, people said it was fun.

The line was fun, met some nice people, only lost 5 slots due to people letting their friends show up late, but Freddies clamped down on that once they heard it was going on. The sale at midnight went very smoothly. Kudos to Freddies.

Around 9:30 or so, this dude walks up and says “hey” I’m lookin’ at him, going hmm, I’m freezing, but I know this guy. Dad? No! It was moondog, from #macintosh on IRC. Have known him what, 2 years, but never met him. He lives down the state about 30 mins. He came up cuz barry said I was being a fool waiting in the cold heh. Weirdest part was it didn’t click who he was until I added a Mac OS X window frame around his head, cuz I’d only seen him on webcam. ROFL. Was nice to meet you, moon!

So I go to McD’s after I get my goods, I’m hungry you know. The one across the street was closed, so I went entirely the opposite direction to get some food. I’m officially old - I got food before gaming.

Anyway, I get home and turn on my system with the Harmony before I connected the Wii and my tv won’t come on. Three blinking lights. Shit! Matt helps me track it down - Bad power supply or convergence IC. Shit! Oh well. Then he finds if you unplug the Toshiba TW56X81 for 5 mins, it might reset. Yay! It did. This is the first time the TV has ever done this, so it might be on the “blink” har har. Wonder if it comes on this am. I have not gotten out of bed yet

The entirely best part of the 8 hour ordeal? My girlfriend, the wonderful Elizabeth, showed up with her friend Erin around 10 something. They had gone to a concert (had free tiks, so why I didn’t go. Those free tiks cost me $419!!! haha) and came by to see how I was doing and Elizabeth warmed me up in as safe-for-public manner as she could. How cool is that, to have someone drive by on the way home to make sure you are ok? She rocks, really rocks.

Good day it was

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(Thanks, Ketra!)

The iRobot virtual wall keeps a roomba inside of a room. Because Fizzgig took a tumble down the stairs, I decided to use the virtual wall to give it a better idea of where to stop.

The virtual wall shoots an expanding IR beam across a distance of 3 to 9 feet depending on its setting. However, there is a prism which splits the beam, aims it upwards and reflects it out via a half-dish mirror, so there is a circular protection zone around the virtual wall unit to keep Fizzy from running into it.

The problem is, at least with new batteries, this virtual hole is 3 feet in diameter!

So as a test, I did some low class tests and found that, just like in photography, toilet paper makes a good diffuser.

So I took a couple sheets, folded it over twice on one end to form a little bead, wrapped the bead around the reflector on top and twisted it at the back side.

I then angled the virtual wall unit down the stairs a little, just to move some of the widening beam off the stairs.

This video is the result: Watch (5.8mb, requires QuickTime)

shhhh, don’t tell her. ok, she knows. I had to ask what she really wanted engraved on it.

She is writing a 50,000 word novel in a month along with a lot of other people, and I’m damned proud of her, so I got her a motivational gift (its engraved with the event and her email on the back)

She is coming over tonight to get it, but if you wan to see what Apple’s gift wrapping option looks like, here it is. Nice quality ribbon, too!

Elizabeth named my roomba “Fizzgig” from The Dark Crystal

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hahah roomba just fell down the stairs, bin came out, and it said “oh oh” in beeps

Guess the stair detector isn’t so hot. hmm

So I charged the room, moved some chairs, unplugged my laptop and set roomba to work.

It rocks!

Ok its not a replacement for a full vac. But on a maintenance cleanup, it does a really good job.

It runs around banging into things, going under chairs, etc. I moved most chairs into the kitchen and it still went under them in there, getting crap off the kitchen floor.

It didn’t like the floor vent too much.

My discovery SE from woot.com came with the nicer caster wheel.

The roomba got stuck under the backside of my couch because the corner is slanted and it wedged the roomba so the wheels were off the floor. The roomba cycled 10 times and got free. Later, it hit the same spot, got wedged and abandoned cleaning.

I stuck it in the middle of the living room and did a spot clean to get what it missed.

This is what the roomba picked up in 45 minutes:

Update: I will make a time lapse video of the roomba working. Also, I plugged in its home base charger, powered it up, pressed SPOT + CLEAN at the same time and it beeped, spun, and docked itself for charging!

A piece on the Zune ends with “but i love my new shuffle” and “Why doesn’t Microsoft get some decent design people”

haha

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I ordered a Roomba from woot.com and it was set to be delivered today. So I get up, check my tracking widget and it says delivered!

Sure enough, they delivered it last night. I had not noticed because I was boot camping all night. They must have dropped it off while I was at PMUG.

So my robot sat out in the cold all nite!

I’ll let the robot warm up to room temperature before I try to charge it and put it to work

Boot Camp is Apple’s system for letting one install Windows XP onto a Intel based Mac. Boot Camp partitions your disk into two partitions, one for OS X and one for XP, creates a CD of drivers for XP and then installs XP.

I have a copy of XP that came from the launch. It has no service packs (major updates) so I can’t use it with Boot Camp. The Intel macs require SP2. So I spent $5 and ordered an XP SP 2 CD from Microsoft (how cool of them!). That arrived so I was ready to go.

I run Boot Camp and let it create my CD of drivers for the Mac hardware. Then Boot Camp tries to partition my disk, but it found disk errors! Well thats a nice side effect of this whole process, actually. So I boot into single user mode, run FSCK and I’m all fixed up (geek method which is faster than booting off the OS X installer cd and running Disk Utility)

I reboot and try to partition with Boot Camp again. No go. Now it can’t move some files. (ie, some files are so important to OS X they can’t be moved down into the OS X space so a XP partition can be created)

Well poop. So I boot off my external HD and run Boot Camp. Now it tells me I cannot partition an external disk. So much for that.

Next I run iDefragLite which I had never run, but owned as part of Coriolis’ iPartition package. iDegragLite ran overnight and when I woke up, the hard disk was nicely compacted with a huge block of free space at the end.

So I reboot from the internal drive and run Boot Camp. Success! I now have a 10gb partition all set up for windows.

I whip out my brand new Windows XP SP2 CD, insert it into the Mac and click “Begin Installation” Acccck. No go. “No installer CD found” Sheesh. Ok so I check on the CD and it just installs SP2! Its not a full installer CD, just for the damn service pack.

I run Boot Camp again where it kindly offers to delete Windows XP and restore the 10gb back to my Mac drive. I thank it and accept.

Yeah, that’s right. Doug Morris, one of the music industry’s enlightened ones, of Universal Music, says “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it”

Screw you, Mr. Morris. Screw Microsoft for caving into your licensing, too. What did Microsoft do, you ask? They agreed to pay Universal $1 for every Zune sold. Oh I’m sorry, you’re paying Universal $1 if you buy a Zune. Universal gets 50 cents an the remaining 50 cents is distributed to all of their artists equally. YEAH, RIGHT.

Oh and you don’t get any free music after paying your Universal tax, do you? Of course not, because you’re a thief and you have been found guilty by Doug Morris and the Microsoft court of appeals agrees. By purchasing a Zune you have signed the plea bargain in admitting you are a thief.

Next up? Who knows, maybe Doug’s buddies from the RIAA might be sending you a letter. You’re a thief after all!

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Because the guy can’t install the software due to an “error” muaahahahah.

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Heart Attack Grill

Eat the quadruple bypass burger and a scantily clad nurse will wheel you out in a wheelchair. 8,000 calories.

be the first in Oregon and do it in the rain, when people are fed up and want to get outside.

We have a Sonic Burger now, first one in oregon, so Elizabeth and I went by last night. They have drive in stalls, like the 50s. Two rows of cars backed up, the parking lot for Kohl’s was coned off, one row for drive thru, one for the stalls, about 15-25 cars in each row.

We went for Sushi.

Reporter - “I wonder if you have metrics on your reading contest with Mr. Rove”

Pres. Bush - “I’m losing - I was obviously working harder on the campaign than he was. ok, he’s a faster reader”