I broke down today and got a Dual Shock 3 controller.  Yes, Sony has punished me for their stubbornness in not settling the whole force-feedback lawsuit.  But, I’m glad I got the controller, it works well in Burnout Paradise and my new game GRiD.  Unfortunately, the force-feedback does not work in Call of Duty 4 (I’m hoping for a patch or something to activate it).

Talking about new stuff, I also picked up GRiD today (I got a stash of birthday money).  I had downloaded and played the demo — I didn’t know what it was, but I thought I had to give the demo a try.  What a fantastic demo it was, very polished and the presentation was spot-on sexy.  I just had to get the game after playing the demo.  The driving mechanics are not hardcore simulation like the Gran Turismo series, they have some simulation feel to them, but the mechanics lean more towards arcade (though, not crazy arcade like Burnout Paradise).

The thing that intrigued me was the damage modeling in the game.  It is pretty cool and a car can be broken down into pieces — and the debris littered all over the roadway as a driving hazard for the rest of the race.  Gran Turismo 5 Prologue still continues to “tradition” of Super-Man cars that are indestructable.  That has always been an annoyance to me, as I could use other cars as bumpers around corners to win races.  Not here with GRiD where your car can fall apart from too many hits — the damage modeling is cool, but not realistic as each car can take quite a beating before falling completely apart or malfunctioning.

GRiD is the old Race Driver TOCA game, but with the RPG and backstory crap ripped out — and the hardcore simulation engine removed and replaced with a more arcade-like engine.  I am glad they ripped out the backstory and drama crap from the game as it refocuses the game on racing.  And what a great racing game this is.  The feel of speed is tremendous — and in some situations it is scary fast, like when one drives the open wheel formula cars which scream down the tracks.  The sense of speed that Codemasters has put into the game is indescribable in words or pictures, you have to play the game to get a good feel of just how fast (and fun) the racing is.

Although I love Burnout Paradise and continue to play it, I wanted something that was track-based to play — and something with real licensed cars.  Paradise’s open-world is both a blessing (it’s rather cool not to be forced to play races in order) and a curse (frakking getting lost during a race really blows).  Having track-based racing lets me practice and memorize something a little smaller than a whole city.  And the licensed cars (45 in total from what I read) is really cool.  Sure, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue has 60+ cars, but do I really want to spend my time racing a Suzuki Cappuccino?  Not really.

Anyways, back to racing!

My lovely wife completely surprised me last night when she gave me…well, a surprising second part of my graduation and birthday gift!

Yes, she got me the watch of my dreams!  Thirteen years ago, when I was a mere 20 years old, I saw a Omega Seamaster Professional on Pierce Brosnan’s wrist in GoldenEye — and that was the watch that I wanted.  Now that I’m turning 33 (tomorrow), my wife has gotten me the watch!  It is a beauty and I LOVE it.  It will get a lot of wrist time compared to my other watches — even the Breitling that I received from my father-in-law when my wife and I got engaged.

This is the new model (#2220.80) that Daniel Craig wore in Casino Royale.  The “Seamaster” is now printed in red, the hour markers are raised (very cool), and it has the Omega co-axial escapement.

Thank you honey for the best birthday (and graduation) gift ever!

• Plastic backing:  Ugh.  It’s so iBook!
• Same crappy camera:  Still no video recording.
• 3G:  The original iPhone should have come with it to begin with.
• GPS:  Same as above.
• iPhone 2.0 software:  Thank you Apple for releasing it for free for current iPhone owners.  I’m sure the same sentiment is not shared by your iPod touch users, whom you continue to screw over.
• The pricing switcharoo:  $199 is $200 less than the original iPhone.  But, the data plan costs $10 more per month — whether you are in AT&T’s 3G coverage or not.  That means by the end of your contract, you’ll have paid $40 more than a person with the original iPhone.  Not to mention, there are no text messages included with the more expensive plan.  If you want to get the 200 text messages that are included with the original iPhone’s data plan, add $5 a month.

Overall, I was not particularly excited by the new iPhone.  Sure, it’s nice to have the extra speed.  Sure, the real GPS is nice.  But, want to pay more just to get those two features?  No.  The biggest thing that turns me off about the iPhone 2 is the plastic back — it really cheapens the look of the phone.  Basically, the iPhone went from sleek MacBook Pro aluminum backing to cheap entry-level MacBook plastic backing — complete with your choice of black or white plastic.  I wonder if Apple will charge more for the black plastic iPhone — like how they charge more for the black MacBook.

Thank you wifey for such a cool gift!  You are a kick-ass wife and the PS3 is a kick-ass gift!

I wanted a PS3 mainly so that I can watch Bluray movies — we already pay for Netflix, so it would be better to take advantage of the Bluray selection, rather than pay a whole lot more for HD satellite feeds.  I must say, the PS3 is quite impressive — although, I guess I could be a bit biased as an ex-Sony employee.

Observations about the PS3:

• Now that Bluray has won the high definition format war — finally — the PS3 has an upper-hand when compared with the Xbox 360.  Whether it really plays out, I don’t know.  But, that was the whole reason why I wanted a PS3:  Bluray.
• Brilliant move pricing the lowest priced Bluray player the same price as the PS3.  It just makes people think that they are getting a “free” game console with the Bluray player.
• Demos on the Playstation Network (PSN) are great!  Usually, I don’t play through a whole game unless I can really get into it — and there are not many games that I can get into.  So, playing a demo from start to finish is usually enough to make me satisfied.
• PSN network speed is horrendous.  It takes forever to download something from the PSN.  I tried downloading the PS3 update from PSN and it ran ~160kBps, which is terrible (my DSL line is a 3Mbps line so I get around 300kBps max).  Sony needs to invest into more bandwidth (or stop throttling).
• Even though Sony is out to sell Bluray discs, there is still a market for downloadable video and audio content.  So where is it Sony?  Sony has a whole library of movies, TV shows and music that it can sell online.  They should get on the ball and start doing it — Microsoft does it with the Xbox 360 and Apple does it with the AppleTV already.
• The PS3 hardware itself is beautiful.  When Alice lent me her Xbox 360, I was surprised by the size of the total package — most importantly that the power brick was the same size as the Xbox 360 console!  The PS3 is all enclosed, the only thing that sticks out are the HDMI and power cables, no fugly external power brick here.
• The PS3 is quiet.  Alice’s Xbox 360 was loud — not just the fans, but the drive also.  And not just “kind of loud”, more on the “this is distracting my gameplay loud?.
• I’m kind of disappointed at the lack of 1080p games.  Most games seem to run at 720p, which is fine, but I figured the PS3 was powerful enough to squeeze out 1080p gaming easily.
• The DVD upscaler (software) does not do as good of a job as a dedicated DVD upscaler.  When compared to the old Pioneer DV-400V upscaling DVD player that we had, the PS3’s upscaled DVD output is a little disappointing.
• The SixAxis controller is lighter than I thought.  Also, I don’t like having to pay for Sony’s stubborness when it comes to rumble.  Sony should have swapped out the SixAxis controllers the minute they settled the lawsuit against them.  One of these days, I’ll get a Dual Shock, but not right now.  I’m fine with the SixAxis.
• The lack of PS2 backwards compatibility is a disappointment, but not that big of one.  It is not like I have played any of my old PS2 games recently and that I would pop one back into play anytime soon.  I still have my slim PS2 in the garage and can pull it out to use when I want.  It would be nice to have the backwards compatibility, but not a requirement.  What is hugely disappointing is the actual reason why Sony stripped out the backwards compatibility from the 40GB PS3.  Sony reasons that “by omitting the option of playing PS2 games, Sony hopes that new customers will instead spend their money on more PS3 games.”
• The one game that my wife got me was Burnout Paradise — because I’m a huge Burnout fan, I have all of the games on either the PS2 or PSP.  Burnout, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Revenge on the PS2.  Burnout Legends and Burnout Dominator on the PSP.  Now, Burnout Paradise on the PS3.  Fantastic game.  The only thing that has be a bit frustrated right now is that I still don’t know my way around Paradise City and that makes doing races a bit difficult — as sometimes I find that I have turned on the wrong street and am going the wrong way.  If only Criterion would have made the minimap like a GPS device — mark out a general route (that skips shortcuts) for the player, if the player gets off route, then “reroute” based on where they are heading.  This would help lessen the frustration of being lost in the city — there are subtle hints that Criterion threw in like the blinker on the car will give you a hint where to go.
• The one movie that my wife got me was Casino Royale.  The movie is a gorgeous showoff film for Bluray.  The scene where Bond and the bombmaker are fighting it out on the crane really shows off the resolution of Bluray movies (as the water sparkles brilliantly in the background while the helicopter-mounted camera revolves around the two from a long distance).
• Remote Play functionality — where the PSP can take control of the PS3 and display media (and some games) — works really well.  I was surprised at how easy it was to setup and get going.
• Although the PS3 has no PS2 support, it, ironically has psOne support.  The support works and there are some “enhancement” technologies to try to make the old games look new again — like texture smoothing.  The psOne games I have tried on the system (Gran Turismo 2 and Metal Gear Solid) both work well and look…well, like the are ten years old.
• Netflix continues to amaze.  I sent back movies the day that I got the PS3.  That night, I logged into my Netflix account and flipped on the Bluray option and moved some Bluray discs to the top of my queue.  The next day, Netflix received my DVDs and sent Bluray discs to me.  I got the Bluray discs the following day.  That is normal operating style for Netflix and it continues to amaze me.  Now, if only Netflix to adapt their “Watch Now” feature to stream HD content and stream it to a PS3, that would completely knock me out of my chair.
• The PS3 is made as a media center.  What I love is how the harddrive is easily user-replaceable (which I will do with an old, larger notebook drive.  What I also love is that the PS3 can play all sorts of media — including MP3, WMA, AAC, DVIX, XVID and H.264 AVC.  And all of this can either reside locally, on a USB thumbdrive, on a DVD-RW disc, or can be streamed over the network (from a DLNA server or, as Alice tells me and I have to test out, an Apache server).  The PS3 is surprisingly open for a product that has come out from Sony.
• The PS3 can also take Linux, but I don’t know if I’ll go down that route.  I have enough Linux boxes at home (yes, one can actually have “enough” Linux boxes).  I don’t really want to turn my PS3 into a semi-Linux box also.

I guess that’s a long-winded enough posting for now about the PS3.  I’m sure I’ll have more later.  Do you own a PS3?  What do you think about it?  And what’s your PSN name?  I want to add you to my friends list!

Sometime during my career at Sony, I figured out that I should probably finish up a degree of some sort.  I signed up for classes at University of Phoenix (Online) because Sony was going to flip the bill for me — and doing it online was better for my schedule because I was travelling so heavily.  And it really helped when Jacob was born as I could do my homework at night after the little monster went to sleep.

It took 3.5 years to finish my program (I had quite a few “pauses” during my degree program).  Tonight, I finished up my final group project and posted my last messages.  I am finally done with the program (Bachelor of Science in Information Technology).  Soon, after I get the grade for my final class, I will register for graduation and get my paper degree.  I will be certified “edumacated” (or as the wife likes to say, “gradumacated”).

Now what?  What does it mean?  I gots me a piece of paper.

So before I start let me give the standard disclamier:  I am writing as a normal person, not as a Yahoo! employee.  None of this reflects what my employer feels or thinks or is doing or is not doing.

I don’t think I need to add anything to O’Reilly’s posting, so I will mass quote (emphasis added by me):

Yahoo! has let itself be defined by the same kind of penis envy. Here is a business that has beaten Google in area after area, that is unquestionably the #1 media company on the net, and yet has let itself be defined by the one area in which it is #2.

Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can’t say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.

What do you think?  Think O’Reilly is wrong?  Think he’s right?

Shouldn’t a tool that is advertised to help people open those f*cking blister packs (whoever invented them should be shot), NOT BE PACKED IN A BLISTER PACK?  The packaging even reads, “No more hard to open packaging…”  It should come with an asterisk — might I suggest:  “* after this one.”

Eileen, Jacob and I were toasting at home — and we just had to get out of the house to enjoy some air conditioning.  We had gone to the mall and Fry’s earlier.  It was too early for dinner.  We had a bag of old mobile phones to donate, so we jumped in the car and headed to our local Best Buy.

After dropping off the phones, we went inside to walk around.  Somehow, we ended up in the desk aisle and that’s when Eileen spotted a deal.  “Hey, this desk is only $11!” she proclaimed.  “Whoa!”  I reacted.  We tracked down a sales guy who looked it up and told us that the display model was the only one left.

Darn.

We’ll have to get the display, but it can’t hurt to ask for a discount because…well…it’s the display model!

After a minute, the sales guy came back with an offer of $1 off!  Yay!  Done deal.

Original price:  $54.

Clearance price:  $11

Our price:  $10

Total savings:  82%

And I didn’t even have to do the hard work in this heat of putting the thing together.

Can’t we just all be friends?  I guess not.  It is all business.

• Intel 3945abg works out of the box!  This was true with Fedora 8 also.
• My Atheros-based card works out of the box!  This was not true with Fedora 8 and I am so happy it is true with Fedora 9.  ath5k finally works well.
• Suspend on my main notebook works flawlessly.  It goes to sleep.  It wakes up.  Wireless works when it wakes up.  No video wonkiness.
• It is fast, very fast.  It does not feel as snappy as Ubuntu, but it is a good change from Fedora 7 and 8.
• USB stick installs with persistent data is so cool and useful.  Now, instead of carrying just portable apps on my USB stick, I can carry a whole damn OS.
• The Add/Remove Software application sucks.  So very slow on doing anything.
• I can finally play MP3s for free without hassle.  Nice.

That’s it for now.  I like it.  It’s cool.  I reinstalled my OEM Windows Vista in a VirtualBox VM and it’s working fine.