Wii: What to Play ?

We gave my son (nine and a half) a Wii for Christmas. He's had it for three months now, playing it under strict restrictions (Wiikends only, for example). We have some Wii games and some GameCube games, and here's a list of some titles and how they get rated by him and his cousin. If he slates your favourite game, well, remember that he's telling it like he finds it, not as one would like it to be.

Wii Games
Wii Sports:	Very Good
Cars:	Very Good
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz:	Challenging
Monster 4x4 World Circuit:	Best Game Ever
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam:	Awsome
Sonic and the Secret Rings:	Challenging & exciting
GT Pro Series:	Too hard to handle the cars on turns
Rayman Raving Rabbids:	Raving fun !!
Creature from the Krusty Krab:	True to SpongeBob
GameCube Games
Spyro: A Hero's Tail:	Fun and Exciting
A Series of Unfortunate Events:	Challenging, fun, & true to movie
F1 2002:	Very very hard indeed, but very realistic. Good lessons
Nicktoons Battle for Volcano Island	Good clean fun !

I don't know if it's more by luck or by good judgement (I suspect mainly the former !) but we've ended up with a set of games that he and pretty much all his friends like.

The novelty of playing "unattached" certainly helped to start off with, but hasn't diminished in any way so far. The kids also play with the various system parts, like making Miis, and perusing the shop and, sometimes, going online. This latter I have made a "with daddy only" activity, and they respect that - they know what I do for a living and that I know (I hope) more than they do !

In sum, I was apprehensive getting a game machine for my son, having nightmares over whether he'd be up all night playing on the thing, but so far I've had no problems. Now if you ask me again in another 6 months things may be different, but only time can tell.

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 - 2007

Thanks to "About.com Today" for this. It's a piece of the
past for, I'm sure, many of us.
Mark Flanagan of About.com says:
Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84 years old. 84
years is a long time for anyone, but Vonnegut often seemed
frankly amazed at his longevity. He was, famously, a heavy
smoker and prone to depression. It's interesting how often
our great artists, who contribute so much to people's health
and happiness, live lives that seem short on both.

New Jersey is, as many know to their cost, a heavily taxed
state. In fact, one could term it a "State of Transitory
Wealth", considering how much goes to the state in
Trenton. Here where I live we just got a reassessment
of out properties. Mine about doubled, which is lots more
than the real increase in value. However, you can't appeal
it unless you can show that the new value is at least 15%
above or below the average for similar properties around
last October. Difficult as nobody was selling then !

I got an email from Blogger that I had a comment, but the
comment hasn't shown up yet !. hmmmmm. Oh well.
It was from Tina Ernstrom, the photographer for the Messiah
production that I mentioned. Apparently I was being
particularly blind, and all the preview pics are still
there. Sorry !

For the DVDs talk to John Ribera (jribera@cc.usu.edu).

Interesting Blogger feature: I've selected Trebuchet
as a font today. I have to do all my line-wraps by hand !!

Have fun everyone.

The Blogger Returns

A posse ad esse non valet consequentia
(From a thing's possibility one cannot be certain of its reality)

Living here in America I have become aware, partly by observation of the people around me and partly by comparisons with those in Europe that I left behind in 1992 to come here, that this little fragment of a cautionary note is, in very many instances of human life, totally ignored. In fact, I see quite the reverse attitude. People are becoming obsessed about what might happen, rather than what very probably will happen.
I suppose that this is a natural consequence of the national shock caused by the events of the 11th of September, 2001. Instead of assessing risks and benefits and planning to avert or ameliorate those problems that are reasonably attempted, and accepting that some things just can't be tackled, one sees demands that every eventuality be considered and planned for.
If one is dealing with a nuclear reactor (as I have been for the last 21 months) then this is a reasonable attitude, in that the consequences of many errors are both catastrophic and easily avoidable.
If, on the other hand, one is dealing with something fairly minor, one hardly needs to go to the same lengths. I could point out some cases, however, where care seems to have been replaced with an obsession bordering on paranoia ! Like people here also say: "get a life, for heaven's sake" !

Do you IM ? I think that this is a tool that people seem either to use an amazing amount, or not at all. Right now I have an MSN account, a YIM account (Yahoo), and, by special invitation, an IMVU account. I used the MSN account for a little while, but wasn't that enchanted by it, so stopped. YIM, on the other hand, is a lot nicer and has people that I actually talk to, so that's always there. IMVU bills itself as a video/graphically oriented IM, and, to some extent, it is. However, it desperately needs to take lessons on ease of use from Webkins, the site my son plays on.

This is a short blog (letting me get some rust off my nib ) so I'm closing it down here. Mentions go to Porcupine Tree, whom I shall see in May (see here for others going), to Tola, who commented on one of my blogs: "you're such a sweetie" !, and to anyone else who deserves it !!

One very last thing. A little while ago a group of people in Logan, UT, put on a performance of the Messiah by Handel. If you like this, take a look over at this blog page where there are some pictures. Unfortunately the number is shrinking, but you can also get a DVD of the performance (when it's mastered !) and the proceeds go, I believe to a project that helps identify people withy hearing problems in Baja California.

She also has a quick review of the new AppleTV too, which is seriously cool !

~~Late addition ~~
I just got told that the place to contact for DVDs is NAFDA. They do good things.

New Toys - Where Will It End ?

sic transit gloria mundi

which might describe me. I'm writing this as the first piece of English (or anything else, for that matter) that I've composed on my new Acer 9300 laptop. A birthday / Christmas / New Year's present to the Man of the House from Himself (via TigerDirect and UPS), of course, as nobody else would dare do such a thing :)

I'll only bore you a moment with stats (2 GHz 64-bit AMD cpu, 2 GB DDE2 DRAM, 17" screen) before going on to complain that the keyboard is, of course, one of those chiclet types with about 2mm travel but so what ? It's quiet, no heavier that the one it replaces (a Sony Vaio from 2000) and easier to type on. It has a built-in wireless network card, which is convenient for scribbling in one places, like standing one-legged in airports (I'm lousy as a stork, so I never do that), but it'll be too big for the tables in Starbucks (I hope), giving me an excuse to find somewhere else !

I can see that sitting in aeroplanes is going to be fun, as the thing is only about 2" narrower than my hips, and that's got to be too wide for the little fold-down tablettes. Still, maybe I'll ust fly Virgin from now on and play all their in-flight games instead.

I've been wandering the internet in search of tidbits, as is my wont, and landed on Bill Thompson's article today in the Telegraph. When, in what seems not to have been a previous lifetime, I worked in a web company help produce a tool to make web pages, the problem of finding out just how many people were visiting the sites was quite a problem.Revenue comes from advertising the cost of advertising space is determined by "eyeballs", the estimated number of individuals who would look at the space. Many of our customers built sites that got you to identify yourself in some way (at least once) so that subsequent visits could be discounted (or not, depending on many things).

However, Bill points out that many of the younger generation discard identities with reckless abandon - sometimes because they're forgotten the password and can't be bothered to really think to remember it, and other times because they really deliberately want many identities (to trade amongst, for instance). This is probably going on in large amount - now that he mentions it I realise that I've seen it myself, and not taken any notice, but Bill is a more astute watcher of humans than I - and it rather makes a mockery of all the executives counting heads and asking for money based on that !

Have a fun weekend everyone. I've some programming to do.

Happy New Year !

Happy New Year to the others who led me into Blogging - at which I've been somewhat of a failure, but I promise to try harder !

Sarah Hague (St Bloggie de Riviérè). Sarah - you're the best !!
Colin Randall (salut). The most entertaining journalistic refugee.
Diane Rauscher-Kennedy (Art). I swear I'll save up enough for a stunning objét of yours soon !
Tola (FaeryKnits) (a.k.a. YesGirl). Also a good rep for the SCA.

There's a lot of others around who were a Good Influence on me this last year, I'm sure, and there were lots of good events to celebrate. Things like the successful launch of the Corot orbital telescope to hunt for planets around other stars. Things like the Powers The Be finally recognising that Global Warming in real (it would have been so nice if they'd actually started doing something about it 20 years ago, instead of waiting for the water to start lapping around their ankles !).

Best wishes to all who read this.

The Last Day of 2006

It's been a long time, so probably nobody'll read this but me, so that explains why this is a bit monologish. I've just ripped three Michael Chapman CDs that I received as a birthday present. Michael's been a pro guitar player for almost forty years now, and familiarity just seems to breed respect. The problem with being a fan of someone like Michael is that, as nobody'll ever admit to having heard of him, you tend to have to do unusual things - like buy all your CDs from the man himself, as no shop or web site ever carries them, and entering the track names on GraceNote and CDDB yourself, as very often you're the first to be ripping the disc !

With 26 albums of his (I just went and counted !) I suppose you could call me a fan. If anyone has a copy of Americana, though, I'd dearly love to buy it. I have Americana II, and have heard some of Americana's tracks, buy want that CD ! Anyhow, I just got "27 06 05", which is a recording of a concert he did on that data at The Greys in Brighton, which is where I grew up.

For Christmas I got something seriously more modern - Smoke and Mirrors from Marillion, the two albums from the Holiday Weekend in 2005 at Butlins, Minehead. I haven't listened to the double CD Mirrors yet, but Smoke (the single CD) is great.

Recently I've been listening to internet radio instead of CDs, and getting a good strong dose of Prog Rock. Groups such as Sylvan, Frost, and Ayreon especially. I think that these three will certainly feature in my CD buying list in the next few months. Remember that Frost is officially no more, so try to get Milliontown before it's sold out. Sylvan's is a German site: there's also a Dutch band Silvan. Finally in this musical adverts spot, take a look at Heather Nova.

So, I've spent a very large quantity of my spare time since August getting my teeth into VB.NET 2005 together with SQL Server 2005. All I can say is that I'm very thankful that I didn't try in January ! The six months have provided a huge amount of information onto the web for people to find. Even so, I've easily spent $500 on books, as it's impossible to predict what you'll need to know in advance. Finally, however, the effort is beginning to pay off. However, it's been painful at times !

After over a year with an AMD-based machine running Windows XP/64 I suppose that I was getting blasé. I had got to the point of believing that MS tools worked ! After all, I had installed the Express editions of VB and SQL Server with no problems. This feeling of security vanished abruptly when I installed Visual Studio 8. I did all the things that the release notes commanded me to do, and didn't do all the things they commanded me not to do, and then looked at what I had. The install had added a new copy of SQL Server Express, which was not what I wanted . In addition, it wasn't running. In fact, I couldn't find any services connected with VS8 at all !

OK I though - time for a reboot (akthough the install hadn't asked for one). The PC never came back !

Not good !

Eventually, through Safe Mode and the rebuilder, I found that the video drivers had been trashed, but somehow in a way that prevented me from re-installing them. Every time I touched the video software either the screen went blank or else the complete PC just stopped dead.

So, I added a small - 40GB IDE - drive to the machine and unplugged the two 200 GB SATA drives. Fine ! I can recreate a new system. Well, for a week or so, and then it crashed again - "cannot find NTOSKRNL.EXE". Well, I could find it, but I couldn't blow it away and replace it, so that drive was moved down a notch and yet another drive introduced and XP/64 installed.

Now things went better - except that it refuses to boot without the distribution disc in the CD drive ! So my original C: is now D: and my original D: is E:. So none of the original installs work and I've spent countless hours in reinstalling software onto a system that, before Visual Studio, was working extremely well.

The moral of the story appears to be to do development on your second-best machine ! Right now this PC has become a second-best machine !

My other birthday/Christmas/New Year present was a shiny new Acer 9300 laptop with a gleaming expanse of 17" of LCD screen. Seriously neat, and I hope to review it here for you in the next little while.

Meantime, however, my better half is calling ... New Year's Eve festivities are calling. Best wishes and a prosperous New Year to you all.

A Less-than-Perfect Time !

Dulce et decorum est
Numerator pro homo mori.

yeah, well, in the last month - since I was here - I've lost my work computer once (only 2 months after the previous time !), and my XP/64 machine at home twice. I also cannot get into my server at home :( Talk about misery - my email is on a disk I can't load right now, and to get Windows XP/64 to boot I have to start with the CD in the drive. After its started it's ok, but something somewhere in the reinstall didn't work ! Still, my son's happy, listening to Crazy Frog, and we're invited to dinner tonight, which is a relief, as I'd no idea of what to cook !

Right now the family is slowly moving into hibernation mode. The inside of my nice german bettdecke is being pulled out this weekend and replaced with the double-thick one. It's a really neat "extra-breit" model from my favourite shop in Germany - Möbel-Mann. I got all my furniture there back in the 80s when I lived in Darmstadt, and dragged the wife in last November. She was almost converted into a shopper by the place, as it's three or four floors of quality you just don't get to see in America these days. I came away with my bettdecke, which it what I really wanted, but not a new bed. I saw the one I wanted, but the shipping cost to the USA was about three times the cost of the bed itself !

Anyhow, last night we went out Wii-hunting. This, for the uninitiated, is a form of a window-shopping-style sport where one searches for a product that hasn't yet been released. Last week one could have been PS3-hunting, but we decided not to after several people got shot or beaten up. Not cool at all. Nintendo lines seemed lots less tense, partly because the machines will be cheaper, and partly because the supply should be greater. When asked, the Offspring indicates that he'd like a Gamecube (his cousin has one), but that a Wii would definitely be the best of all possible toys. Like the geek that I am, I've been trying to steer him towards Lego Mindspring, but I think at 91/2 he's a little youngish yet. Maybe for his birthday - then I can program the thing too !

Something else I've been getting into in the last few days (while also fighting a cold) is an internet prog rock station called The Dividing Line. It broadcasts through a WinAmp format and is definitely recommended. Finally, I'd meant to point any who hadn't seen it yet to Google's TV channel, "Current". This does a very large amount of Viewer Created Content (VC2) in very short segments. Lots of these are really great, and, even if you don't like one, you only have to endure it for a few minutes before another one comes along. Rather like what mothers used to tell their daughters about boyfriends, really !

Have fun, everyone. Hopefully I'll be back sooner next time.