I rented a couple of games over the weekend, “Taz: Wanted” and “Sly Cooper” - both for the PS2 (obviously?)

Anyway, I’ll do a quick little reviewlet of each of them. First, “Taz: Wanted” - my thoughts upon seeing this were that the Taz game for the genesis was fun, so maybe this one would be too. I played the game for a grand total of maybe an hour and a half - not a good sign, right? Well, first off, the sound was absolutely terrible. The voice acting was all fine, but the actual sound quality was worse than listening to a radio call-in show. It literally sounded like the voice actors “called it in.” The game itself was interesting for about an hour, when the lack of new challenges, and frustration with the level of stupidity take over. I don’t know why exactly, but the game became boring quite quickly. It was fun at first though, being able to eat all kinds of strange things (park bench anyone?) and destroy large parts of the landscape. There wasn’t much more to it though, and some of the “puzzles” were of the “try everything, something has to work” variety. I’m not a big fan of that approach to platform games, since I usually end up spending large amounts of time essentially banging my head against a wall.

Sly Cooper, on the other hand, is tremendously fun. The storyline is that you’re a master thief, from a long line of master thieves, and your family heirloom, the Thevius Raccoonus, has been stolen. Your goal is to steal all the parts of the Thevius Racoonus back from the five evil villians. Of course, they’ve ripped it up, so you only get a page at a time, but each page contains some interesting little technique or ability that you can use to become a better thief. The graphics are awesome, but more importantly, they take a back seat to the gameplay. The controls are intuitive, and relatively easy to get a handle on. Each new technique becomes second nature, and at times, it’s amazing how simple it is to do incredibly difficult looking things. For instance, I was running along the rooftops, with a bazooka toting fox chasing me. I jumped off of a rooftop, not knowing where I was going to land, but managed to spot a hook in the sky, snagged it with my cane, and swung myself to another roof. All the while, running full tilt.

Sly is a fun game, but sadly, rather short. I think I’m at 85% after playing a little Saturday night, and a little more yesterday. I think I might be able to wrap it before I have to return it tonight, but if not, I’ll rent it again.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “‘Disembowler IV’: the game where condemned criminals dig at each other with rusty hooks.” - Bart

Sadly, I don’t have time to do a regular post up. I’ve got a conference call in about 2 minutes, so I’ll make this quick.

I’ve started working on a Mozilla toolbar addon, that hopefully will wind up rocking. Mozilla is actually pretty easy to develop for, once you find the right place to start in the documentation. I’m thinking it’s still going to take a long time to get anything working smoothly though.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Gambling’s Ok It says so in the Bible.” - Homer

I promised to document my monkey comments, and in so promising, I actually see to have documented the punch line…

Anyway, Monday night, I noticed that our 2700 receiver (the old crappy one that doesn’t even have timers) didn’t have all the channels that we pay for. I mentioned to Erin that it was her turn to call tech support, since I’d spent so much time on the phone with them Sunday night.

Erin called them, was on hold for about 20 minutes, then talked to a tech, who walked her through a bunch of troubleshooting steps, before deciding that “nothing is wrong” so in order to get our programming sent to the receiver, she’d remove the receiver from our account, then add it back in. “Turn off the receiver for 25 minutes, and everything should be fine.”

It was halftime, so I figured it was no big deal. After the 25 minutes was up (actually a little longer) I turned the receiver back on, to find that we had four channels now - all the “expressvu infomercial” channels, and that’s it.

Erin called back, and talked to a guy who insisted that he was “trying to help us,” all the while the only help he actually offered was to tell us that he was “trying to help us.” Apparently saying it enough times makes it true.

At one point he pulled out the old “it can take up to 24 hours for this kind of change to take place” CYA statement. My response was that I know the connection to the satellite takes place at the speed of light, and the connection from the satellite to the dish is also at the speed of light (close enough) to which he basically just repeated himself again. Here’s where the monkeys come in…

As I said yesterday, I know that they have to give the monkeys their breaks, and that it’s quite difficult to peel bananas in space. I mean, the slightest movement can send you spinning, which brings up yesterday’s bananas, and then you have to peel more. It’s a vicious cycle, and as Dave pointed out yesterday, there’s the whole feces throwing issue too. We finally got things straightened out yesterday morning (miraculously) and the 2700 seems to be working normally (despite what our good friend the tech “support” monster called a “defective receiver”)

It was quite a frustrating experience, though really, out of 4 CSRs that we talked to, we got one really bad one, two average (but incompetent) ones, and one excellent one. Overall, those are stellar CSR numbers, no?

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Aw, they were just about to show some close-ups of the rod!” - Bart

We went to Chic-Peas for lunch today - I’m glad that it moved within walking distance of here.

After spending the better part of two hours on the phone with Expressvu tech support again last night, I was quite frustrated, I had some classic quotes involving the monkey that’s running their satellite, and how hard it is to peel bananas in space, but I don’t have time to put them up right now. Hopefully this will remind me to document them at some point.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Oh boy. That monkey is going to pay.” - Professor Frink

I spent the better part of an hour and a half last night talking to Expressvu’s tech support people. Erin and I were just settling in to watch Armageddon, when supper was ready, so I paused it. When we came back into the livingroom, Erin noticed that the “time left” had stuck at “27:27″ and wasn’t increasing. I hit stop, and was treated to the “acquiring sat. signal” screen. Then we decided to try and watch a different movie that we had recorded a while back. The playback was behaving oddly, so I shut the receiver down, which is the way to fix anything flaky (right?)

Well, anyway, long story short, the 5100 never came back on again. Well, that’s not quite true. The power kept cycling on and off, with no intervention from me. I tried all the tricks that I could think of, and none of them worked, so I called the Expressvu tech support line. The first guy I talked to wasn’t terrible, as Sunday night tech support goes, but his eventual solution was to get me to unplug it for 20 minutes, then try again. This supposedly does a “hard” reset of the box. Anyway, after that didn’t work, the second guy was pretty stumped. We tried all kinds of things, including bypassing the A/V receiver - basically to confirm that the 5100 was at fault here, and not my genius at hooking up A/V equipment. During one of my times on hold, I decided to see when we got the 5100, to see when the warranty would be good until. If you look back through the archives here, you’ll see that it arrived the night of September 10th, last year. ie. my warranty expired a couple of weeks ago Fortunately they’re still going to fix me up good. They’ve sent out a replacement unit, which should take a week or so to arrive, and in the meantime I’m sitting with my old receiver, which doesn’t even have event timers. Man that sucks.

Yeah, I know, boo hoo.

Anyway, at one point I was thinking that I might have to abandon Expressvu, and find an alternate PVR solution, so I went searching for PC based stuff - that SnapStream stuff looks nice. Not nearly as convenient as the satellite receiver, but still, there are lots of things you can do with it that the 5100 won’t - for example, add bigger HD’s, save shows to CD, stream it through the PS2…Worth a look anyway, since the software + PCI capture card works out to ~ $100 US, which is significantly cheaper than my PVR was (even if you add in the price of a 40 gig HD)

So I guess that means that I’m going to have to hook up the VCR all properlike.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I have money, I bought stock in a mace company before society crumbled.” - Selma

Because of a website that I’m involved with, I have to come in to work early tomorrow morning.

I was given the task of updating the site with a new style, and while I was at it, I made it more modular, so that the same task can be accomplished quicker next time. It didn’t take me very long to do (maybe two days tops, which is decent for the amount of pages that needed reworking) but the end result looks great. Unfortunately there had been some relatively major changes done to the backend systems that hadn’t been rolled out to the production environment yet. I wasn’t involved with the project at that point, so I really don’t know what all got changed, and what needs to be done to roll those changes into production. If they’d rolled that out back in February when they made the changes, I would be able to make the switch with the website not having to go down. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

Hopefully it doesn’t take me too long to do my part (shouldn’t take more than five or ten mintues) and everything runs smoothly, but just in case I’ve got three or four hours before Jason and Amy are coming over (oh yeah - and Mya :) for the afternoon.

On an unrelated note, I think I’m addicted to proofreading on that Distributed Proofreaders website.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I can’t let that happen! I won’t let that happen! And I can’t let that happen!” - Homer

Headlines are supposed to give an idea of what the story is about, and also entice you to read more. The point originally was to sell more newspapers, or magazines or whatever. In the world of “online journalism” headlines are quite often the only thing that people wind up reading, so “online journalists” have to make their headlines even more enticing, since in order to read more of the story, the reader has to actually click on the headline, which is a lot of work.

I am going somewhere with this, just don’t know if you want to come along :)

Over the past few days, I’ve read some headlines that say one thing, but I read them as something else. “Escaped Emu mistaken for Naked Man” was one example. I read emu to be a short form of emulator, and was wondering how one would escape. Today, I was treated with “MS May Be Sexually Transmitted” - where I read MS as being Microsoft. Especially odd, since I read yesterday that Melinda Gates (Bill’s wife) had a baby girl. I like the headline I saw associated with that too - “Dude you’re gettin’ Adelle” because that’s the baby’s middle name.

That reminds me - I have to update the template for this site so that the headline shows up in the titlebar as well.

Oh yeah, and I think I’m going to try and post a picture or two today - haven’t done it yet, but check out my pictures page.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Miss Hoover, I glued my head to my shoulder.” - Ralph