well friends this counts as my 100th post. i consider that to be somewhat of a milestone given how often i've doubted whether i should even bother to post updates. i've had this going since october '03, back when i was a senior computer science major at texas a&m and had much more interesting things to rant about. that comes out to about 25 months, and this being the 100th post, i'd say i stick to once a week on average pretty well. hopefully i can hash out 100 more before i lose complete inclination to maintain an online presence. ;)

the xbox 360's release yesterday has got me thinking about gaming. apparently from now on console releases are gonna be this ridiculous. people camping out for hours, and plenty of them going home empty-handed. one wonders if there was truth to the rumors of microsoft implementing an artificial shortage of 360 consoles to drive up demand. so far demand looks pretty high, and should get even higher closer to the holidays. microsoft had better hope demand is high, given the BusinessWeek report that they could be losing up to $126 on each console sold.

as far as my personal thoughts on the 360 itself, i think i'm less opposed to it than i remember being with the original xbox. i vaguely remember being pretty against the idea of microsoft getting into the console business. it wasn't until years later (probably 2003) that i had played a few games for it and thought it wasn't as bad as i had feared. what i don't like about the xbox realm in general is that they seem to have the least originality of the big 3 console companies, with nintendo leading the way and sony having established several solid franchises since bringing the PS1 stateside in '95. the first xbox system seemed to have garnered most of its success through halo and halo 2, and i'm not sure how far an everyday first-person shooter can get you, even if they're great FPSs.

although i haven't used it myself, it does seem to me like microsoft executes online gaming very well. i can see how putting on the headset and getting online and chatting to your friends while fragging each other or racing or whatever can be fun, although i can't really see myself getting into it all that hardcore. i think sony and nintendo could learn something from this type of online model, which i'm sure we'll see in full effect in the coming console generation.

the 360 console doesn't really turn me off, the round white theme they've got going on is much better than the darth vader vibe the original put out. being the owner of a purple gamecube i can hardly judge a console on its appearance though. i think the 360 could fit in my living room well, and i like the idea of the controllers being entirely wireless, it's about time. i was also impressed by the idea of being able to turn the console on and off through the controller, something i've always wanted.

it's microsoft's interest in pushing HDTV gaming that really makes me even consider the thought of purchasing their console. i'm willing to bet their 720p games would look terrific on my 720p native HDTV, far better than the 480p signals the cube feeds it. while i can't say the masses are entirely ready for high-def gaming to be the standard, i am. i see no shame in placing higher priority on 5.1 soundtracks and gorgeous graphics if you've got the means to fully enjoy it.

the truth is, in moving from being a child to a teenager to a young adult, i think i place less importance on having allegiance to any one console manufacturer. i went from being an NES player (it was all anybody in my neighborhood really knew) to an SNES player (and thus automatically hating all things genesis) to a PS1 player (which i barely chose over the sega saturn, luckily; but since i was all about sony i snubbed all things N64) to a gamecube player (chosen for nostalgic franchises and a general boredom with playstation) to buying a PS2 once they got cheap and playing multiple consoles. a long-winded way of explaining it, but the point is as of today i'm of the impression that i have the means to buy multiple consoles if i want, it's a relatively low cost compared to the games themselves.

the good thing is i'm not really in much of a hurry to start the next generation. i actually remember feeling the same way back in 2001 when all the new consoles had come out. hell i was still enjoying playing my PS1 in my dorm room the first 2 years of college. so i kinda say so what if the PS3 and revolution are 9 months away from launching. i'm willing to bet i can still enjoy my cube and PS2 for that long. god knows i don't have a shortage of games to keep me busy.

to blow off my $100 best buy gift certificate, i did pick up an electric blue nintendo DS. it wasn't really one of those things where i always felt like i wanted one, just where the gift certificate could kinda offset the cost of the system so it became more attractive. mario kart DS was just released last week, and nintendo has reported that half of those that have bought it have played it online over wi-fi already. so i picked up the DS, super mario 64 DS (heard it was great), mario kart DS and a carrying case.

i'm quite impressed with the system. i've toyed around with a couple wandering around best buy before, but admittedly i never really know what i'm doing. i'll have to get used to the weird thumb-strap stylus setup, but the graphics and sound are awesome. i was able to set up the wi-fi to play mario kart online at 3am last night, against somebody with japanese characters for a name, heh. in a weird way it's actually kind of a dream if i stop and think about it. i've been playing mario kart since like 1992ish, and here ~13 years later i can play someone clear across the world. i'll have you realize that i could technically play a game against someone in another country while sitting on the toilet. that's just fucking cool. i fully expect lauren to try it out and immediately get one, after which she'll be kicking my ass in mario kart online in no time, heh.

well sorry for the ridiculous length, but nothing else to do up at work the day before thanksgiving. ;)

--j

well shit, this is work the week of thanksgiving, huh? last year i took the entire thanksgiving week off so i didn't really get to see what it was like up here. i had to blow some sick days earlier this month so i didn't really have a chance at taking any days off now. in a way, it's actually kinda nice if you don't let yourself slip into a completely depressed state of boredom. it's kind of all nice and quiet and there seems to be this unspoken sense of nobody really working incredibly hard. i kinda strolled in late today assuming nobody would miss me, and i was right.

i think it's funny that thanksgiving has kind of become the signal that the end of the year is nigh. it's sorta what fuels everybody into thinking life ain't that bad, and the next few weeks of december usually fly by pretty easily. in college you kinda have to associate it with exams and end-of-semester type stuff but when you're in the working world you just associate it with less people being all that serious up at work.

--j

i hate to ask... am i just getting old, or is system of a down starting to suck? i don't really get it, more and more of their recent shit is just annoying me more than impressing me. i don't mind that they don't seem to get over the idea of making every track of theirs political in some way (see the recent success of green day), but c'mon, why so fuckin goofy lately? and who said that lead guitarist should sing so often? let frontman serj handle it, hey?

a quick & pointless thought,
j

i seem to be on this roll of one post early each week, so why stop now?

shit i played like 40 minutes of grand theft auto 3 (yes, $5 used from gamestop) and i was proud of myself for just passing a mission and having something to save. i seem to have this thing now where if it's past like 1am i can't get myself to turn the ps2 or cube on. i've yet to really break out of this whole going to bed every night at 3am thing, so at 1am i should be able to do as i please. doesn't seem to work that way, it's like deep down i know i should probably just go to bed, so i can't be bothered to start a whole gaming session.

it's much easier to just watch something for 20 or 40 minutes, really. especially cuz it seems like such a ridiculous idea to eat a meal without being in front of the television. even when alayna & i eat dinner, 95% of the time it's in front of the TV, either catching up on tv shows or watching some kinda sporting event. it's actually kinda sad that we could get by without a real dinner table at all, heh.

right now i'm actually kinda light on short 20-minute shows to sit down and have a late-night breakfast to. my go-to show for a while was futurama, but i kinda just got sick of it. i had been going through season 2 eps, and i've heard it gets better as it goes along, but eh, i think it's one of those shows that's much more fun with other young gen-Y assholes around than by yourself at 2am. the truth is i'm prolly more likely to throw in an old 'the office' ep than something i haven't seen. i guess i could throw in the chappelle's show season 2 eps that i never got around to.

i seem to be quite well stocked up on 40-minute dramas though, which is what i seem to waste time with the most these days. i'm burning through (well not burning through 8-episodes-a-saturday [24] like rick or 4-episodes-a-night [sex & the city] like alayna) alias season 1 relatively quickly. it's a surprisingly easy show to watch and plenty of fun to watch late at night by myself with nothing but chocolate milk & pop tarts to keep me company. i've tried a bit harder not to stockpile too many other shows, but i've still got the first few seasons of 24 and dead like me to hit up.

rick mentioned that he watched some movie at home the other day, and it kinda reminded me that i haven't watched an entire movie at once at home (or anywhere else for that matter) in way too long. for a while there everything i had missed at the theater i'd just download and watch the retail DVD 4-5 months later at home. i've lost interest in a lot of the crap hollywood's put out lately and so that seems to translate to the lack of bothering to get anything a few months later. it's funny, you can look at our saved movie stubs and notice this huge downward trend of how often alayna & i have gone to the theater.

the truth is, i think you kinda tend to feel like you need to get value out of what you bother to put money toward. i'm paying $11/mo for direcTV's HD pack and $130 spread over 6 months for their NHL package, so i tend to watch that stuff pretty often. as much as i dog the concept of live tv, i'm still pretty motivated to just surf now and then, it's just these days i spend most of my surfing time watching hockey games and HD content.

it's kinda funny, we've completely fallen into this routine now where we basically watch nothing live, for two reasons: commercials and not being able to get ABC in HD. in general, pretty much everything is shifted a day or two late. a few shows i'll watch the day of, generally because i'm the only one that cares about them, like family guy and the office. desperate housewives & grey's anatomy don't get seen till monday & tuesday (waiting for HRHD 5.1 posts), prison break usually a day late, amazing race is still shot in SD, so usually just tivo'd and watched sometime later, lost waits for the high-rez posts, but the end of the week usually gets hectic and usually gets pushed to the weekend. all the thursday night shows we follow, survivor (probably our guiltiest "pleasure"), reunion and ER end up getting watched in between lazy naps on saturdays & sundays. just thought you should know the specifics. ;)

--j

i'm feeling somewhat philosophical here, so bear with me...

i've written about this before, but i'm still baffled by how anti-social being online seems to have become for me. it's funny, i think i started really getting online for real (meaning more of a constant IM presence, consistently checking an email account, etc) around maybe '97-98ish, so a good 8 years ago. i used ICQ daily for a while, mostly talking to dallas-area teens i had met online (and typically ended up meeting in person) and fellow honda del sol enthusiasts. i was still using it when i moved to texas a&m in fall 2000, but when i got there i realized everybody used AOL IM instead, so i switched.

in college, people add buddies to their lists at the drop of a hat. you have a class with somebody or do a project together, they're on your list. i've seen people with 200 names on their list. with a good 50,000 young people in a 10 square mile radius, it makes sense to know a ton of people online.

after graduation, you really have no need to keep in touch with a good 90% of the people you talked to occasionally in college. personally, i trimmed down my buddy list down to nothing once i started working. i kind of just assumed that i'd meet people up at work and the buddy list would grow a bit more. the problem is, not that many people seem to really use IM like i thought they would. i don't know if it's just chance that i happen to be in a circle of friends who don't really use IM all that much or if it's actually true that people in their mid-20s don't use it that much.

it's kind of depressing. at this point i literally only converse with probably 4-5 people over IM. i guess i pictured a good 20 people online every night, keeping tabs on each other with away messages and such. it turns out everybody just uses their damn cell phones to connect with each other, which is fine, but kinda old-fashioned if you ask me.

consider this my rant of just wishing the world was as high-tech as i'd like it to be.

--j

bleh, alayna's been sick, now i'm sick. i tried to play it off like it was just some nagging allergies but it was bad enough to make me blow off work and just come home. i hate when you're not really doing all that much up at work and you've got the slightest thing wrong, you just can't motivate yourself to stick it out much.

so far i've been surprisingly shitty at going up to work during off-hours, which i knew would be a possibility now and then. during off-hours i think it's only like a 12-minute drive to work, but i rarely see the good in busting my ass putting in some weird hours. i think if i was still living alone it wouldn't be quite as tough, but i've found it pretty difficult to just call alayna up out of the blue and tell her to cancel everything we had planned. come to think of it, i've had more and more problems just working a dilligent 40 hours a week in the last few months. could be a good sign that i'm burned out on the project i'm on, although admittedly i bet a lotta people get like that closer to the holidays.

we finally got down to college station post-graduation for the first time last weekend. we went down to meet alayna's parents for the hurricane rita-reschedule iowa state game. the weather was absolutely perfect for being at the game (a frequent complaint of mine while a student) but the game itself completely sucked. we got totally blown out and the most entertaining portion of the game became watching how many people would leave when something else bad would happen for the aggies. our seats (which had to be re-reserved post-rita) were dreadful, and we spent 90% of the time watching the video monitor instead of the field. at least we got to sit down.

other than the game, our 200-mile trip was cool. we made it a point to eat out at places that we couldn't get up here in dallas, with the exception of a double dave's trip on a packed-in-college-station saturday night. fazoli's, chicken oil and layne's were great, and oddly made the trip entirely worth it. we had fun with lauren & ali as well as with alayna's parents. we didn't really go out and live it up all that much (admittedly we don't really know any students there anymore) but lauren and ali's apartment was plenty hospitable for us. lauren and i had a good enough time just watching 'the office' eps and trying out mario power tennis.

we've got some good stuff in the pipeline for november. i've got a luncheon up at work this friday which should be cool. we're lined up to go to a mavs game in a couple weeks and a couple more stars games. we'll be spending thanksgiving in dallas since we'll be in san antonio for christmas and in colorado immediately after till new years.

up to the same ol' tricks here lately. been enjoying the last of season 1 numb3rs episodes and the first season of alias. got some solid tivo time in today and giggled through cheap seats. actually watched a live ep of the office tonight, brilliant as usual. we're hoping some better movies hit the theater here soon so we'll finally have an excuse to go.

that's the gist of it.

--j