BETTER THAN SLICED BREAD

So I arrived home from work today to find a large box waiting for in my bedroom. Inside said box was the Xbox 360 prize pack I had been waiting for. It was the premium version of the 360 complete with 20 Gb hard drive, wireless controller, and headset. It also came with PGR 3 and a Forza 2 faceplate. Because Forza 2 has been delayed, the fine people at Pepsi/Doritos will send it to me when it gets released.

It took only a few minutes to set up including connecting it to my router. I tell ya, consoles have come a long way. The last console I owned was a Playstation 1. The 360 impressed me from the second I turned it on. It updated automatically and I didn’t have to do a single thing to setup my network connection. It took less than a minute for me to grab my gamertag (Irv74, add me!).

The 360 dashboard is a slick application. It’s so easy to setup all various parts of the console. I was able to see the various trailers, demos, and content that was available for download. There’s nothing complicated about it at all.

I was having so much fun and I hadn’t even played a single game yet. In preparation of today’s blessed event, I went to the EA store on the 19th floor to purchase a game. Based on gwilli’s recommendation, I got Burnout Revenge. When the game loaded up, it was clear that next-gen graphics do indeed kick ass. Even at a paltry resolution of 1024 x 768, the game looked fantastic. I can’t even imagine what it would look like at 720p on a large widesceen. Without reading the manual, I played through a single track, smashing cars left and right, in general having a great next-gen time.

I’ve had less than two hours with the 360 but I am really impressed with Microsoft’s offering. In 2002, I had some doubts about MS’s ability to make a good console. The original Xbox was a monstrosity. It was a big, heavy machine which looked ugly next to the much slimmer PS2 that you could place vertically. The original Xbox controller was also massive, which had people wondering who it was originally designed for.

Whatever shortcomings the original Xbox had, I think MS has fixed them for the 360. Almost everything about it has been well-designed. I still can’t believe we’re into the era of networked consoles now. Amazing!

Enough talk for now, it’s back to the 360!

XBOXED

My long awaited Xbox 360 arrived via Canada Post in the mail today. Unfortunately, no one was able to answer the postperson’s knock on the door. They left a pickup card instead. I had a feeling it was going to arrive today. Other people in Vancouver who won were reporting their 360s arrived on Sunday. Greg, of gwilli fame, got his on Sunday as well.

Greg was so confident that I was going to get mine today that he bet me lunch it’d be waiting for me when I got back from work. Well, as I mentioned earlier, only a pick up card was waiting for me. So close! The card listed the delivery time as 9:30am. If I had known it was coming at that time I would have delayed my commute into work. Sure I would have been late but I would have made up for it. So, while I was on a damp and humid bus headed towards downtown Vancouver, my 360 was getting ever so close to my home. It was on my doorstep!

So it’ll be ready for pick up at the 7-11 just down street at 1pm tomorrow. I have decided to send an emissary, or as some people call him, my father, to pick up the precious cargo for me. I’ve warned him it would be disasterous if he dropped the package in any way.

Though the package comes with Project Gotham Racing 3, I think I’ll stop by the EA store tomorrow to pick up an EA-published game for cheap. I hear Carbon is good but I don’t want another racing game. There are the sports games but I’d prefer another genre. Though, I am interested in the new NHL game, having worked on the PS2 version many years ago.

The whole issue is slightly moo (how you doin’?) however, since I have no suitable display to play the 360 on. Playing a next-gen console on a standard definition TV is a waste of pixels. My new widescreen LCD monitor doesn’t arrive until Friday. What I’m left with is my trusty old 17″ CRT monitor with its quaint 4:3 aspect ratio, allowing me a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768.

I’ll be able to setup up 360, register my new gametag (say hi to Luvs2Spoog69!), sign up for my free month Xbox Live gold membership, and yes, even play a game or two.

And finally, though my own Xbox 360 is sitting in some mail sorting plant right now, here’s a picture of someone else’s Xbox 360 prize pack.

1080 WHAT?

I have been quite interested in technology since I was a child. As a kid, it seemed I always knew about the latest consumer electronics innovation and was on top of every new gadget introduced into the market.

I always shook my head when adults seemed stupified at tech talk. I would cringe when people would go to an electronics store all clueless and then be at the mercy of some salesperson. I vowed never to be like that.

It dawned on me a few days ago, I was coming very close to not knowing anything about consumer electronics anymore. So let’s examine this for a second. I haven’t upgraded my computer since 2002. I’ve actually never bought a TV. I don’t own an Ipod. I’ve never owned a DVD player. Until last year, my cell phone was a Nokia brick. I’ve never owned a stereo. I’ve never owned a CD player.

Despite the fact I have post-secondary degrees in “tech” and work a “tech” job, a lot of the “tech” that was going on in the world was kinda passing me by. I first noticed this when I started my job at EA.

When I got my Xbox 360 dev kit, I realized I’d never been that close to one before. Despite working in the industry, it took me about a year after its launch to touch a 360. When I went to hook it up, I was like a 80 year-old senior citizen. It was the first time I’d hooked up component cables to an HDTV. I didn’t know where to plug the controllers in nor did I know how reset the console. Oh man and then there was HDTV itself. They gave me a $1200 HDTV to display the game on and I had no idea about all the myriad of inputs and outputs on the thing.

I managed to hook up the HDTV alright but a few days later, some guy came to my desk and asked me why the game looked like crap on my TV. It turns out that I hadn’t set it to the proper resolution. It was on 480i or something stupid and he put it on 720p. At the time, it was just a blaze of numbers and letters… 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. I had no idea what those numbers meant, I had a clue but no real answer.

Then I got my PS3 dev kit and it used an HDMI cable. I remember asking myself what the hell an HDMI cable was. It was an eye-opening experience because for the first time ever, I felt I knew what those old people in the electronic store were feeling.

It’s taken a few months but I think I’m back on track. If I were to go buy an LCD TV and a next-gen console tomorrow I’m pretty sure I would know exactly what to consider.

Speaking of which, I think my Xbox 360 arrives in the mail this week along with my new LCD monitor! Yay!

MY TEACHERS – PART 1

I don’t consider myself an incredibly successful person but the reality is that I could have turned out a lot worse. While none of us are perfect, for the most part, I’m happy with both my traits and character. There’s no doubt my parents have some influence on that but a lot of the credit must go to my teachers.

Yes, it’s cliched but teachers do have a lot of impact on children’s lives. Beyond teaching them important stuff, great teachers provide children with a nurturing, safe environment so they can be themselves, grow, and explore. Of all the shepards of the world, teachers have the most important flock.

In my own life, I’ve had the pleasure to have been taught by some excellent teachers. In this post, I salute my elementary school teachers.

Grades one and two were taught to me by Mrs. Stevenson and Mrs. Weir. Both were quite young and in hindsight much later, both were quite hawt. Oh dear, that’s not the right way to put it. Um, they were both very kind and patient teachers. Being the new kid, Mrs. Stevenson really tried hard to ease my way into a new class. By the way, I still know one girl I met from the first day at my new school. Thanks to both teachers for keeping me safe in those formative years.

Mrs. Tanaka was my fourth grade teacher. She had a reputation that preceded her. We started hearing about how awesome she was while we were in third grade. That alone made me want to get the whole school year over with so that I could be in her class.

When the fourth grade arrived, I found out that the hype was well deserved. Mrs. Tanaka ran a wonderful classroom. She was enthusiastic about teaching and was great with her students. The best thing about her was that she worked hard to let everyone be themselves. The environment she provided allowed people to be not afraid of letting their personality shine through.

It was in Mrs. Tanaka’s class that I first realized I had a sense of humour that was perhaps a bit sharper than the average student of my age. I don’t think I was the class clown. A clown disrupts the class and often draws the ire of the teacher. I did more of the observational comedy stuff. This part I am absolutely not making up. On one report card, Mrs. Tanaka actually wrote that I was pretty good with the “one-liners”. If I still have that report card, I will scan and post it. How often does a fourth grade teacher compliment a nine year-old kid on his comedic prowness?

My sixth and seventh grades were taught by a woman named Mrs D. I can’t spell her last name because I don’t remember the spelling and it was a tough name to get right. My original sixth grade class was huge and it was necessary to split the class into two. It wasn’t so big, however, to split it evenly, so only five or six students had to leave the main class.

They were going to stick these overflow students in with the seventh grade class. Now, when you’re in elementary school, the seventh graders represent the mightiest of the mighty. They were the oldest students in the school and were either feared, respected or both. Some of them had even entered puberty!

Somehow, they chose the five or six students that they believed had the maturity and skills to cope being in a seventh grade class (even though we’d being doing our own sixth grade work). For some reason, I was chosen to be in that bunch.

It was hella scary at first. All the seventh grade guys seemed have deeper voices and they all had scary peach fuzz hair on their faces. Most of the seventh grade girls wore makeup and they had developed breasts which made my pants tight.

As scary as it was, Mrs. D. made sure the seventh graders never took any liberties with us, sorta like McSorley with Gretzky. Man, one time she unleashed a firestorm of a verbal tirade at some dude that looked at one of us wrong. She was also careful not to make us look like we needed too much protection because that’ll get you a shiv in the gut at recess.

On the academic side, Mrs. D. introduced us to some pretty cool books like A Wrinkle in Time. Oh that Charles Wallace! She also let us read radio plays like the classic Flight into Danger. We all got to pick several parts from the play and we’d read the whole production aloud to the class. Here’s a bit of trivia, Flight into Danger was the basis for the Airplane! movie. Years before I even knew who Leslie Nielsen was, I was asking one of my classmates if she had either the chicken or the fish.

In the seventh grade, I was also taught by Mrs. D. who seemed quite pleased to have us back as students. Many years later, while I was in undergrad, I heard that Mrs. D had passed away. To this day, she’s still the only teacher I know who’s not with us anymore.

So, there you have it, the teachers who guided and helped me along the way between 6 and 12. I know none of those teachers will ever get to read this but thanks for being there.

Next, the teachers who helped me along in my most awkward of years, my teens! Stay tuned for D&D goodness!

THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD RIGHT NOW

1. If there’s a muscle between your eyebrows, mine is randomly twitching and has been for the last two days. I wonder what that could mean?

2. I really want my Xbox 360.

3. I should probably order that widescreen LCD monitor for my Xbox 360.

4. I wish I had gone to bed earlier.

5. I might open a new bank account with an Indian-based bank.

6. I should probably get new shoelaces pretty soon.

7. I really want my Xbox 360.

8. I was probably the last person on Earth to get call display for their cell phone.

9. I’ll end this list one short of ten.

OH PATIENCE

I consider myself a patient person. I know it’s a virtue and it’s something I strive to maintain. I do exceedingly well in lineups. I realize there’s nothing I can do to make the line go faster, so if I want to pay for something then I’m going to have to wait. The only other choice is leave but without whatever I was waiting for. Realizing this keep me calm while others fume around me.

Traffic is harder to accept but if there isn’t a shortcut to be used, waiting is the only thing you can do. Honking the horn isn’t going to make things better. So you can either sit in traffic and be grumpy about it or you can sit in traffic and be calm about it.

Now in most cases, I’d like to think I’m kinda like Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menance. When dueling with the evil Darth Maul, the two got separated and trapped between timed force fields. While the Maul paced impatiently like a caged animal, Jinn dropped down into a meditative pose to calm his nerves and focus his energies. Now forget for a second that moments after the force fields switched off, Maul put a large hole in Jinn’s chest and killed him.

As patient as I think I might be, this damn Xbox thing has gotten to me. My 360 was supposed to ship either last Friday or today, but now sources tell me that they won’t ship until probably next week. As a sign that I’m crumbling under the anticipation, I bought a $45 VGA cable for the Xbox 360 I don’t even own yet. The other end of the cable is going to a widescreen LCD monitor that I haven’t even ordered yet. The next step is probably going to see me buy games for it.

And in other news, I’d like everyone to welcome a new blogger to scene. Hot on the heels of GK.com, gwilli, Bone, and many, many others, comes Joel himself. After a delay of many months, his blog is now live. While you may not agree with some of his opinions, please go say hi to him.

MALLS

As if by some unspoken signal, people decided to flock to the malls this weekend in massive numbers. On Saturday afternoon, I met up with my good friend Garrett at Coquitlam Centre. I had to park my car near the outer edges of the lot because there were so many people there. It really surprised me at how crowded the mall was. I guess there are only four weekends until Christmas (three now).

Anyways, I kinda got annoyed at the amount of people I had to contend with inside the mall. I was still in the mode of shopping for myself, not for presents, so really I should have been exempt from the crowds. We later decided to get a snack at the food court after GK got his item. The area was packed with people and I had to line up for several minutes to get my poutine. It was delicious but I wished I had gotten the large size. By the way, I ate very little in the way of healthy food this weekend. Poutine on Saturday and several pieces of KFC on Sunday.

Then I tried to tempt fate again on Sunday. I busted one of my shoelaces last week, so I’ve been walking around with an unsecured shoe. I unfortunately forgot to buy some when I was at the mall on Saturday so I had this crazy idea Lougheed Mall wouldn’t be packed today. I decided I’d go take a look at how packed the parking lot was.

When I got there, it didn’t take me long to realize things were probably a madhouse inside the mall. People were parked in areas they shouldn’t be in and there were vehicles circling all over the place. I decided to leave immediately and saw there were even lineups to get out of the parking lot. I had to use a little known shortcut to avoid waiting for at least ten minutes for the traffic to clear.

I have decided I will not visit any suburban malls until after Christmas is over. I might duck into Pacific Centre since it’s so close to work and it’s traditionally less busier than other malls. And that’s your weekend forecast.