Tonight was going to be an extremely productive night, or so I thought.

1) I planned to upgrade this blog from dasBlog version 1.6 to 1.8.

2) I planned to install Windows on a new PC, and start using that as my primary machine.

Ah well, 1 out of 2 ain't bad.

The upgrade to dasBlog went fairly smoothly. For some reason my web server's FTP server is extremely flaky, and I lose the connection every few minutes. So upgrading was tedious, but I blame FTP. So here I am on 1.8. I might try a new theme in a few minutes too!

The install of Windows is currently on pause. And I may be screwed - well, I may have to pony up $200 for a new license for Windows. Damn.

OK, here's the story so far. I am currently running an old Pentium 4 1GHz (1.5GB ram 400GB hdd) as my main home machine. Yes, I know - 1 lousy GHz. But I don't do much with it other than Office, Outlook and IE, so it suits my purposes at home.

I have been accumulating parts for a new computer, and finally have it together. An AMD Sempron 2800+ (512MB ram 300GB hdd). I will of course have to buy some more RAM later. But last night I was doing some speed tests, and it turns out the Sempron is 3 times faster than the Pentium 4 I have. So what the hell - I figured I would switch over permanently.

And so here I sit. Having done the Windows install on the new machine. And it's asking for my license key. I have a box full of official Microsoft CD's and keys, so no problem. Or so I thought. I must have 20 official copies of Windows around, and 20 keys, but none of them work. I have keys for XP Home, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Enterprise, Advanced, this, that and everything. But no XP Pro. I have an official CD for XP Pro. But I can't find the license key anywhere.

This is crazy. There should be a better way to manage these keys. They are slips of paper and they can be easily lost. So what can I do? Call Microsoft and say I lost my key, and I would like to transfer my copy of Windows XP to a new system??? Hey... maybe I can do that. It's worth a try at least. Right?

 

Let's see if this works:

Note: If you are on XBox 360 Live and would like to add me as a friend or compete against me, my gamer tag is UNREAL37.

I've had my XBox 360 for about a week now, and it has worked out very well. Sony PS3 is dead in the water compared to this.

The games themselves obviously are important. The quality of titles, and the quantity of titles. I think I read there are over 70+ XBox 360 games available today. PS3 will not launch with that many titles.

The XBox dashboard is something else too. I've now integrated the XBox 360 with my home PC, and am able to display pictures and play music files in my living room. The 360 has now become my home living room computer, in essence. If you have a Windows Media Center PC in your home, the 360 can play videos from that device as well.

Where the 360 really excels in the online component. You can play games online, obviously, and Microsoft has done a good job getting game makers to support multi-player games in most titles. But the other, sometimes overlooked, piece of XBox live is the "marketplace". It's a place where you can download full games, game demos, game trailers, movie trailers, and other content off the Internet to your XBox.

This is a smart move and well executed. There has been many times I see a game in the store, and I would like to play a few minutes of it before committing $70 to purchase it. Now I can go home, download the demo off of XBox Live Marketplace, get addicted to it, and want to buy the whole thing. It's all designed to get you to buy more, and spend more. I currently pay $8.99 a month to subscribe to XBox Live, and apparently 50% of XBox 360 owners are on Live as well, which is amazing penetration for a subscription service. More money for Microsoft.

XBox 360 has to be considered an incredible success no matter how to measure it. Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) should buy everybody on the XBox 360 Team a Ferrari, because what they have done is hit a home run that Microsoft desperately needed.

(* And if someone on the XBox 360 team wants to let me drive the Ferrari Ballmer gives them, I would be most grateful as well.)

I don't think I can beat the Ask a Ninja review of this film:

“The other thing about this movie was... everybody was a pirate. If you were in the first movie, and you're weren't a pirate, you're now a pirate in this movie.”

“The only thing to which there were more than pirates in this movie are plotlines. Everyone gets a plotline. If you were a dog, you got your own plotline.”

This review is so much funnier once you've seen the movie!!!

 

Technorati was the first, if I am remembering this correctly, search engine for blogs. They became massively popular overnight, and rightly so. I think I even praised it on this blog once or twice.

But has it now become useless? I did a search on Technorati for "cryptologic", a company a friend of mine was trying to get me to invest in. Every single link on the first page of results is spam. Blogs filled with random text, that just happen to contain the word cryptologic.

My first instinct was to report the blog as spam. Hmm.. No links for that. I can add it to my favorites, but I cannot block or otherwise delete these spam blogs.

So, on to icerocket. Spam killed Technorati.

There is something about car racing that makes it the perfect genre for a video game. It's the type of game format that allows for 2-3 minutes of intense concentration (a big race), and you can follow it up with some low-intensity fun (just driving around, exploring the game).

Game makers learned long ago to add a "career" element to most games, so you can feel a sense of progress. Computer-controlled competitors get tougher every race, and you in turn get cash and points to improve the look and performance of your car. You get better as they get better.

I recently read an article that claimed that computer games have gotten a lot easier over time. That is, 99% of gamers that played PacMan could not get past the first few levels, whereas in today's games allow "saves", infinite lives, and are more easily conquered. I don't view this as "the games of today are suckier", but instead as "games have evolved and improved".

For instance, when you play the game Laura Croft Legend, for instance, there are several pre-defined levels. Each level gets tougher. If you had to go back to the beginning each time you died, you would never see the later levels. All of the graphical design and programming work that went in to creating them would be wasted on all but a small number of gamers.

So I don't think it's fair to say that games are easier today than they once were. It's just that the objective of the game has changed. In 1976, a video game was meant to provide 10 minutes or so of entertainment at a time. In fact game designers didn't want you to play for longer than that, since it would cost them money (fewer quarters in the arcade slot per day). Now 30 years later in 2006, games are meant to provide weeks of entertainment. They provide in game prizes for achievement. They provide an incentive for a customer to keep playing them again. The next level is only 1 hour away!

So on my new Xbox 360, I have been finding myself investing dozens of hours in Need for Speed Most Wanted. I am defeating Blacklist guys left, right and center. And I am loving every minute of it.

OK, I finally bit bullet. I decided to take the plunge. I put my money where my mouth is.

I finally bought an XBOX 360.

I blame my wife. In all honesty, without her I would not have bought one yesterday. I would do what I normally do - go to Best Buy, go to the XBOX section, check to see if they have any in stock, stare at the demo of Project Gotham Racing 3, drool, say "That's a lot of money", and then leave.

But yesterday, as I was dropping my wife off at the shopping mall so that I could go to Best Buy, she said, "You're not going to buy one. I don't know why you bother going to Best Buy."

And that pretty much did it. I mean, she called me out. She basically called me "chicken" to my face. And so, $700 later, I found myself holding a brand new XBOX 360 Premium Edition and 2 games.

$700 is a lot just to play two games. I can't wait until a couple of years from now when these games end up at the "discount" game bin for $12 like the current XBOX 1.0 titles are.

But, at the end of the day, as I unwrapped my new toy and showed it to my wife, she said "Why don't we put that in the living room?" She claims that it's so that when guests come over, people can easily play it too. But I think she secretly thinks it looks cool!

Oh one more thing: Her first question when I took it out of the box at home was, "Does it play Tetris?". So my maybe my wife is the true gamer in the family?