Life and Leisure. Tech and Toys.

I got through the third week of lent, but it wasn’t easy. Temptations were thrown in my direction in the form of roommates playing the Starcraft 2 Beta and my pre-ordered copy of Final Fantasy XIII landing on my doorstep. Amazon’s release day delivery actually works! Sadly, I can’t even take advantage of it.

On the plus side, Starcraft 2 looks like it’ll be an amazing game with a life span possibly longer than the original which will be 12 years old on March 31st. While many players are involved in the Beta, those who aren’t will likely continue to play the original Starcraft up until the official launch of Starcraft 2. On second thought, the fact that the game has been announced as a trilogy it may take a few years for the final part of the game to be launched. This will only lengthen the life span of Starcraft 2.

As for Final Fantasy XIII, I haven’t played it yet but I read through the entire manual last night. The game seems like it could get pretty complicated with all the Paradigm shifting. I’m still sad to hear that the game doesn’t include the Japanese voice track. I think Square Enix still doesn’t understand that North American consumers would highly appreciate it as an option. The saddest part is how they blamed the Xbox’s DVD capacity for not including the additional voice track on the PS3 Blu-ray. After years of ignoring Microsoft they all of a sudden want to support the Xbox 360 and the Playstation owners suffer? Console wars rage on.

With these games buzzing around my head I took evasive action and stayed away from home quite a bit during the weekend. Also my company bought me a sweet new laptop to keep me occupied. With an Intel Core i7 Extreme and 8GBs of RAM, I won’t be complaining on how slow Eclipse is running anymore. In a few days I’ll be halfway through this challenge and a little closer to some binge gaming.

I just got a new laptop at work and since this is the first time I’m using a ThinkPad I’ve been annoyed at the position of the Fn key. The Fn key is literally in the exact spot where I would expect the Ctrl key. After a little searching online I found this is actually a pretty popular topic. So much so that Lenovo themselves issued a poll on their blog. By popular demand Lenovo has issued BIOS updates all new ThinkPad laptops (ThinkPad X100e, Edge 13″, T410s, T410, T510, and W510).

The BIOS update allows the user to choose to swap the function of the two keys through the BIOS. To enter the BIOS hold the F1 key at start-up. Once in the BIOS select Config, then select Keyboard/Mouse. Once in the Keyboad/Mouse menu enable the Fn Ctrl key swap. Once you have saved and exited the BIOS, the function of the two keys will be swapped, however you still might be fooled by the print on the keys. I thought about swapping the keys but Ctrl key is a little longer than the Fn key and probably won’t fit.

Source

Another week of lent is in the books. Unfortunately I’m still feeling relatively the same as last week. However I’ve been more active this past weekend which made it much easier. This weekend I was out of the house and occupied so it didn’t give me any time to be bored and tempted to play any games.

This week instead of watching Netflix movies I watched anime. I started by watching Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone but then I couldn’t find a quality version of the 2nd movie. While I enjoyed the movie, I still felt confused in regular Evangelion fashion. The remake was supposed to make the story clearer but it still feels like an episode of Lost. Things just happen without any clear explanation. Fortunately for me, I’ve watched the entire series before but I feel any newcomers will still leave with question marks.

Following my failure to find Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, I turned to yet another remake. I chose to relive the fantastical adventures of Goku by watching Dragon Ball Kai. Dragon Ball Kai is basically everything you loved about Dragon Ball Z with less wasted time. It’s like Dragon Ball Z on lent! Many of the side stories are just completely left out in effort to cut down the original 290 episodes to a mere 100 episodes. Unfortunately, there are some side effects like transitioning clips that don’t really go together. It’s all still very worth it.

Productivity wise, I haven’t made any huge strides in this category. I finished the client admin section of the client website I was working on and I fixed my girlfriend’s old desktop computer. I haven’t touched the iPhone framework for about a week but I have been playing guitar a lot more.

This past week I noticed tiny black spots in my DLSR camera’s viewfinder. These specks didn’t affect my picture quality but were a great annoyance. After inspecting the Viewfinder Eye Piece and swapping lenses I knew the dust particles must be clinging to the internals of the viewfinder. After scouring some online forums, I found my solution to be Giottos Rocket Air Blaster.

You may ask yourself why you would need to use one of these when you could just as easily use a can of compressed air or a simple air pump. The first answer is that compressed air is normally too powerful, and even when used gently there is a chance of residue spray. A tiny drop of residue on the Viewfinder Screen or the Mirror could be irreversible. As for an air pump the design of the Rocket Air Blaster is the key. The unique design allows for blowing without forward suction, instead the suction occurs at the rear. This way the camera internals and dust particles are never sucked into the pump.

All it took were a few pumps of air directed towards the Viewfinder Screen and the Mirror to solve my issue. Be very gentle with air blasts at first, making sure not to touch internal parts with the nozzle. Face the opening of the camera towards the floor so any dust particles can fall out.

I bought the medium sized Air Blaster at a local Samy’s Camera Shop for $16 but I’m sure you can find a cheaper price if you shop around. I had a stroke of OCD and impatience when I saw the specks of dust in my viewfinder which led to the quick purchase. Samy’s also has their own generic branded Air Blaster but I opted for the real thing. Again, it may sound a bit silly but it works!

*If you find that your spots are not coming off it is possible you have dust inside of the Viewfinder Prism or on the top side of the Viewfinder Screen. In this case it is recommended that you get this cleaned by a professional. I still don’t know how anything would get in there since it’s all supposed to be closed up tight.

After one whole week of avoiding video games, I have to say it’s beginning to weigh on me. I’m hoping this is just the hump at the start and the rest is down hill.

Mostly I’ve been having to deal with some stress build up and some boredom. It’s surprisingly hard to work all day and then come home and then convince yourself to do something productive when you used to just hit the controller everyday. This past weekend was incredibly boring without video games. I had no plans and my girlfriend wasn’t around so I just tried to be productive. Having a lot of time on your hands doesn’t help. I ended up watching a lot of NBA games this weekend, along with War Games, Signs and The Usual Suspects on Netflix Watch Instantly. Also the British TV series Skins is pretty interesting if you have a Netflix account.

It might sound like I’m just replacing wasted time with another kind of wasted time, but how I see it, you need some form of entertainment. Like in the Sims when your character gets bored you gotta give them some sort of relief, or else they get sad and piss themselves.

On the plus side, I’ve been learning more iPhone stuff (objective-C is still really weird) and working on a website for a client. I still need to fit in some more photography and guitar.

As it stands right now I don’t see the point in eliminating video games from my daily habit permanently. I do understand the reasoning behind scaling the amount of playtime back though.

Today begins the first day of Lent. I’ve been blogging about giving up video games for Lent for a couple weeks now and the time has finally arrived where I do it for real. Last night I didn’t have time to get in my last hours of gaming so I guess I kind of started yesterday.

I didn’t have time to pack up my consoles either so I’ll try to get that done today so I’m not tempted to play down the line. However, I will need to power on my consoles to remove the disks before I pack up. Technicalities like iPhone games that I play when waiting around are fine unless they become a problem. Watching someone play video games is also fine. Again, the whole point is to eliminate wasted hours spent sitting in my room being unproductive.

I also realized Lent is actually 46 days this year so it’s actually going to be longer than expected.

*UPDATE – This roster update is now available (02/20/2010).

To recap, the latest Madden 10 roster update removed this years retiring players from the game completely. This includes Kurt Warner, Bertrand Berry and Junior Seau. The roster update created an uproar in the Madden community being the first time players were removed for retirement in the same year they were active. Normally retiring players are simply not including the following years version of Madden. EA Sports simply thought being accurate going into the summer was the best choice but it turns out they are flipping the script in favor of the community decision.

Due to the overwhelming response, we are going to release another update that adds the retired players previously removed back into the game. Our fans have spoken and we’ll do our best to have this update done before the weekend. We also plan to push this update to Online Franchise shortly after it’s ready.

It’s great to see that EA Sports is listening to their fans. We’ll see if this continues with features and fixes going into Madden 11.

Full Story

The infinite care package glitch has now been taken care of. Start up the game while connected to Xbox Live to download the patch.

All is well in the world of Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer… Until someone finds a new annoying way to exploit the system.

FourZeroTwo

In preparation for my 40 days without video games I’ve won the Madden 10 Super Bowl, won the NBA 2k10 Championship and defeated Ares in God of War. Of course I didn’t actually beat the games from start to finish in the past week but I cleaned up the games I was almost done with. I plan on packing up my consoles and storing them in my closet the day before lent begins. It’s so I won’t be tempted if I see a controller laying around.

Unfortunately, I started playing Final Fantasy VIII yesterday. I’ve never actually beaten this one. The whole draw magic system always turned me off. It takes 10 mins to fully stock magic from a creature. The first time I played the game I totally ignored drawing magic and just used my Guardian Forces for every battle. Of course that didn’t work out too well.

DRAW -> BLIZZARD -> STOCK

This cropped screen shot was captured on my Facebook homepage. I don’t know what the girl in the picture has to do with winning an Apple iPad but it certainly got my attention. I hate ads like this because the image has nothing to do with the ad itself, its just an easy way to get clicks. Unfortunately I’m sure it has received a million clicks by now, further surrendering our internet civilization to sex in more and more ways. They say sex created the internet, but I believe the internet spread sex just the same.