media stuff

Beautiful Katamari: 10/26/07
Ace Combat 6: 11/13/07

I have to say the Heroes finale was kind of a letdown. The last two episodes of the season just couldn't keep my full attention.

now all i hear is tearing of paper

Now that the futon situation is at least contained thanks to metal plates, my new domestic project is to spruce up my balcony. I didn't have a proper one in Corvallis so I'd like to make good use of this one now that the weather is getting nice. The biggest change I am trying to make is to use mosquito netting to screen it off (at least mostly) so I don't have to worry about bugs or leaves and seeds blowing in. This is actually a bigger challenge than it may sound. I have already been through two iterations and still have not found a suitable way to mount the nets. I was hoping to finish that tonight but I have to let my blokish ingenuity simmer on that one. Perhaps metal plates are involved.

computer h8, part II

I have too much Microsoft in my life right now. My computer is under control, and the Xbox 360 works pretty well by itself, but getting the two to talk together is a pain in the ass. The most annoying bit is that in order to stream music to the Xbox I have to use the Zune software. Even though I don't have one of the damned things. Unlike iTunes for the iPod, which actually works really well, the Zune software is the worst thing in the world. It takes forever to load, keeps trying to rescan the same folders over and over, doesn't organize things properly, and the stupid network sharing service takes up 40 megs of my precious RAM. God forbid if Vista got mixed up in this somehow.

As long as I'm hating on computer stuff, I'd also like to give a shout out to Creative, who can't make an Audigy 2 that won't make mysterious static drown everything out in San Andreas. At the moment my sound drivers have completely failed for no reason. I did see some heartening news recently, which said that sound cards are becoming endangered because it is now possible to do 7.1 Dolby surround sound without dedicated hardware. I was worried I would have to settle for another Creative product in my future supercomputer, but maybe I won't after all.

Since I got the 360 I'm not in as much of a hurry to build a new computer. I did see that Hitachi finally put a 1TB drive on the market, but apparently it's relatively loud and uses a fair amount of power. Which I suppose should be expected from the leading edge. Still, the only thing I've decided on for the new computer is the case, an Antec P180.

look to my left and you'll see where i tried

So I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that Dead Rising does a fantastic job of desensitizing you to zombies. I had to start playing the game slowly because it freaked me out and now I've beaten Overtime Mode and gotten Zombie Genocider. The only other decent 360 game I've played so far is Test Drive Unlimited. I got a bunch of demos off Xbox Live but none of them were very good. Guess I'm stuck until Ace Combat 6 and the new Katamari game come out.