Jeremy Newman's Blog

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:54:00 -0600

The Year in Review
Looking back it has been an incredibly busy year for us. There certainly were less major events, however, that did not stop us from filling the year up with great small things. Like the old, axium, The small things matter. I put together a small photo gallery which summarizes the following events: (The events that have their own gallery have been linked.)

Disney Trip
Summer Cabin Fun
home remodels (basement, and upstairs bath)
La Crosse trip
Fair Fun (State Fair, and Ren Fest)
Jen and Brian's wedding
WineConf
CodeWeavers gets an arcade cabinet

I could ramble on and on about each event like I have in the past, but I will simply let the photos speak for themselves this year.

The last major event of the year is my continued weight loss. I'm pretty happy with the results so far. Since around May, I have lost over 35lbs. This time, all on my own. No special diet, just exercise and eating right. I still have not reached my goal of the decade. I have yet to break the 200 mark. I've come close. I may not reach it this year, but my current goal is to make it through the winter with no significant gain. Then, by next spring, I will definitely break that milestone.

Summing up, good year for both Karen and I. Woot and all.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:39:00 -0500

Hasta La Vista Phatty!
This winter was particularly bad for me and my jelly belly. After all that work a few years back loosing weight, I managed to put a good chunk of it back on. This just won't do. Instead of falling back to Seattle Sutton, I decided to strike out on my own and go the tried and true route.
Step 1.) EAT LESS
Step 2.) EXERCISE
I know, DOI.. right? Anyway, once you get in the groove and stop being a lazy F'r, "You can do it!".

Two things helped me get my move and groove on. First off, I bought some spanky new blades. The K2 Moto Extreme. These are a great set of wheels. The front 2 wheels, are 90mm, and the read 2 are 100mm. This gives what K2 calls an "aggressive" stance. Whatever that means. For me I find these are the perfect blades to handle all the bumps, cracks, twigs, and curbs of outdoor blading around the lake. I no longer fear tripping over things as much as I used to.

The second addtition was Wii Fit.This gizmo is simply a white wireless board that you stand on and do various workouts, and yoga poses. The "game" that comes with it is more or less a simple virtual instructor that guides you throuh the routines. It keeps track of your progress and offers suggestions and tips. Pretty nice package and easy to use. I managed to maintain a daily workout habit on the Wii for over a month straight.

After all this, I have again lost 25lbs! Nice. Not only that but, I feel much better overall. It seems corny to say, but I think the Yoga poses have really helped my flexability and balance.

I still have much more work to do. Even with all my progress I'm still obese according to the game. I need to loose about 15 more pounds to get my BMI under 30. If you put any stock into BMI. Honestly, all I care about is getting rid of my muffin top looking beer gut. Not that I'm going to stop drinking beer, aww hell no!

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:10:00 -0500

Welcome to the Dog Pound.

Karen sent this out as an email, it is too good of a story to not include here:

So I've got a funny story from last night - they are just dogs, but
seriously - the stuff they do.

We've been propping the back door open in the evenings so they can run in
and out at will (until the bugs get too bad). So, Kirby & Bailey had been
going back and forth for about an hour.

The 3 of us (Jer, karen & Eric) were in the basement watching TV, and Kirby
comes racing downstairs, his tongue is hanging and he's panting like crazy.
We laugh, assume they have been chasing each other and let it go.

About 10 mins later I ask "Where's Bailey?"
No one knows. I go outside, take a look around. Don't see him.
Come in. Look around the house. No Bailey.

Finally, we hear a bark and assume he's wanting to come in the house, but
he's not by the back door.

I go back outside. This time Kirby comes with and he starts running back
and forth in front of the firepit/sandbox area (that is fenced in).

Low and behold - there is Bailey. Stuck inside of the firepit area - on the
wrong side of the fence!!!

I'm assuming they were wrestling in the back yard, and he got excited and
jumped over - but couldn't figure out how to get out.

Welcome to the Dog Pound!!!

Have a great Friday.

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:47:00 -0600

DisneyWorld Vacation 2008

Now this is how you get away from a frozen Minnesota winter. Growing increasingly tired of -10F temperatures we hopped on a jet to sunny Florida. We enjoyed temps 70F+ above what we normally have here.

Pictures from the holiday are available here.

The last time we were down to Orlando, FL was exactly 8 years ago. It amazes me how much has changed in those 8 years. Marriage, owning a house, getting a dog. Disney has not changed much in those 8 years. Sure there has been more than a few Disney and Pixar movies released in that time. There was only several major new rides and attractions. The biggest being the Mt. Everest roller-coaster at Animal Planet. At Disney Hollywood they added a live car stunt show. Speaking of Disney Hollywood it was renamed from Disney MGM just last month. We were surprised by that change, but as we thought about it, the MGM name just does not have any impact anymore. Epcot saw the addition of the Soaring ride, and updates to "The Seas" using Finding Nemo as the theme now. Magic Kingdom mostly only had aesthetic updates using new characters to some old favorite rides. The last time we were down, I missed out on several attractions. The Indiana Jones show was shut down, and Pirates of the Caribbean was getting updated. Both of those were new to me as I didn't get to experience them before. Being a HUGE Indiana Jones fan I was on the edge of my seat during that show. Cool Stuff indeed.

The other difference I experienced, was in the area of our personal technology. Back in 2000, cell phones were not very commonplace yet. We are so used to them now, but I remember that we didn't want to get separated back then. Now we can just call and find each other easily. The other change was digital cameras. Now we can take hundreds of photos quickly and easily. For Christmas I bought Karen a new Cannon SD-1000 cam. This was the perfect cam for this trip. Small and easy to whip out for fast photos. Not only that, but it was very capable at video. I took a crap-ton of video. Coming very close to filling our 2 gigabyte flash card. I even took a video of the entire Mt. Everest ride, holding the cam out as we rode. I hope to edit something together and upload it to YouTube soon.

I've always been a big fan of Disney. I can't recommend enough going to DisneyWorld if you are big kid like me.

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:47:00 -0600

Upgrades on sonic today. I switched to PHP5 from PHP4. Made the appropriate changes to the website code. A few months ago, I already upgraded the OS to Debian Etch. That made the transition much easier. I also made some code tweaks to the website. For example I am now using memcached for session management. This reduces the load on the DB server as sessions are now stored in RAM. I also reworked the database class to only open connections to the DB if there are queries being made. Some of the subpages of this site don't need to open a connection. This should also reduce load on MySQL. Exciting!

I learned today that one of my all time favorite NES games Bionic Commando is getting a remake. It will appear on Xbox Live in the spring. I'll be looking forward to that one. I'm also curious to see how the fully 3d sequel turns out.

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:17:00 -0600

Holiday Cheer, Games, and Dog Scare:
Another holiday season has come and gone. Not that I am going to complain. I for one am a pretty big fan of the holidays. Saying that it is a crazy busy time of the year for us is a massive understatement. I didn't have much downtime in the month of December. Like I said, no complaints. I love it. Big thanks and much love to our family and friends that we spent time with over the Festivus `for the rest of us`.

Our annual Winter/B-Day party was another huge success. Thanks in part to Rock Band. Almost everyone was giving the game a try. It is amazing to me how mainstream games have become. Party games such as this really allow anyone to get into the fun. This is what gaming was supposed to be about.

Speaking of gaming: After Christmas passed, I still had the rest of the week off of work. This gave me plenty of time work work my way through my new games. The first was Call of Duty 4. Awesome game. Those Infinity Ward guys really know how to put together a visual marvel, but still give you plenty of action at the same time. The only downside was the length. The game was over much to fast. What was there was above expectations. The second game was Mass Effect. This gas was much more satisfying in amount of time to completion. I had expected this game to take me a month or more to finish. Well guess what, I managed to finish the main quest in only 3 days. Granted it still took me 14 hours, but I never thought I'd finish it so fast. You can blame the games amazing graphics and story to prevent me from putting it down. It gave me flashbacks of Knights of the Old Republic from time to time. That really is not such a bad thing.

Getting off games now...

We had a little accident over New Years . My Brother-In-Laws dog Bailey was attacked by a Pit Bull mix at the dog park. Apparently this animal felt the need to take a chunk out of Bailey's side. The skin was ripped open, but thankfully the chest cavity was not punctured. After a mad rush to the University of Minnesota Pet Hospital, Bailey was stitched up by the excellent veterinarians there. He was made to wear a clear plastic head cone so he would not attempt to pull out or lick his stitches. Poor dog. I am now happy to report that he is doing much better. We expect him to be his normal happy self soon.

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 22:52:00 -0600

Rock Band ROCKS!
I picked up Guitar Hero II back in the late spring of this year. It has been a hit and we love jamming out on the little plastic toy guitars. Yeah, it looks silly, but it is worth looking we-todd-did for the entertainment and laughs it provides. For as much fun as GH was, Rock Band doubles maybe even triples the pure joy of rocking out. RB adds a drum kit and a mic. So now you get to play the entire band. When you have 4 (or more) people over playing the experience is (in lack of a better word) orgasmic.

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:24:00 -0600

Europe Vacation Part Duex
I have (finally) uploaded the photo album for our Zurich/England trip. We spent the first part of our vacation in Zurich, Switzerland. I was there to attend WineConf 2007. It was being held at the Google offices this year. Big kudos go out to the blokes and Google who organized this for us. I do have to say that they have some pretty nice digs. Last I checked, my office at CodeWeavers did not have a freezer full of single serve Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I need to submit a request for that some time. After the conf was over we had time to explore the city. Zurich is another fine example public transportation. There was a tram system that made getting around the city a breeze. Why can't we do this better here in the US?

After Zurich we spend the rest of our trip in England at our good friend Rob and Gemma's flat in Southampton. More time for me to check out the pubs and have some of my personal favorite Steak and Ale pies. Mmmmmm gravy! I always hear that the food in England is not so hot, but I for one love it. I even got into some fish and chips action, good stuff. The pubs are so full of atmosphere. The Cowheards pub in Southampton had fireplaces and smelled of the burning wood. Such an old world feel that is not easily reproduced. Big thanks to our hosts! We had an excellent time. I look forward to doing it again.

Back Home
Now that I am back home I've been settling back into my old routines. The theme of 2007 has been so far "What Diet?". I've put on some pounds this year. I expect that is because I feel back in love with junk food, and being a couch potato. That and a total lack of exercise has put on some more of that old truffle shuffle. I'll get it off, but I'm just not going to worry about it until after the Holidays. No point in trying to go diet crazy during the months of Festivus.

I had problems with Comcast this last month. My Internet connection was dropping too often. When there is no internet I feel like grabbing a pitchfork and torch and forming a mob to raid the Comcast offices. Instead of that brilliant idea, I simply called them to complain. Not as original, but effective none the less. Turns out my cable modem is outdated and starting to malfunction. I ended up buying my own. Since I was changing all my home networking anyway, I went ahead and built my own firewall/nat on Linux instead of using the old LinkSys hardware router I've had for 7 years. I'm much happier with this setup.

YouTube'ing
Check this out:
Yeah, we sometimes do work at our office, but not that day.

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:47:00 -0500

TV Upgrade Time
It was time to replace the old rear projection CRT HDTV. I really liked that TV, but as of late, it's flaws became more and more apparent. The main issue is that for gaming the picture is simply not at clean and clear as what you see on a modern LCD. For movies it still held up well.

The new set is a Samsung 40" LCD that is capable of 1080p resolution. That is 1920x1080 in longhand. The contrast ratio is a bright 10,000:1. Since I have a dark basement, I had to turn the brightness down a bit from the default settings.

I made some minor tweaks to the website. I made my Xbox Live badge more visable. I also added a Twitter sidebar. I update this via Google Talk. So it comes in handy for quick status updates that don't really need a full blog entry. I will try to twitter more often than my average blog time.

Lastly, I beat BioShock. It took me less than a month. That is really good for me these days. I seldom find time to finish an entire game anymore, unless it is an exceptional experience. BioShock was that and more.

Less than 5 days until the release of Halo 3. That should be interesting. I have my copy pre-ordered. Do you?

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:34:00 -0500

ArcadePC
I finally built one! This has been a todo of mine since forever. Well, in actuality the full goal was to build a ArcadePC upright video game cabinet. But, this is a good 1st step. Part of me would rather sit on the couch, and the other part of me wants that feeling of standing at a machine. It is still sometimes crazy to imagine I can literally fit thousands of old games in this one box. The kid in me just drools at the thought. Best of all, no standing in lines with a sweaty handful of quarters trying to get access to the best game in the 'cade.

The ArcadePC is a basically microATX desktop PC case with a video card capable of svideo output. It runs Ubuntu Linux as the OS. It is configured to boot directly to the Wah!Cade front end with custom skins. Currently I have the following emulators on it: MAME (Arcade), MESS (NES and Atari 2600), ZSNES (Super NES), dGen (Sega Genesis), and Daphne (Dragon's Lair).

The PC itself is not much to speak of, it is:

Antec Minuet 300 microATX slim case
Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHz
512 meg of RAM
40 gig IDE hard drive
nVidia GeForce 5200 AGP (low profile)
Sound Blaster Audigy LS (low profile)

I control the whole setup with my X-Arcade joystick.

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:09:00 -0500

Summer Time
There are crap-loads of updates to the site today. I've been meaning to post the following news weeks ago, but as per usual I was far too tied up in being a lazy sloth. It has been a busy year.

Back in May we completely remodeled our kitchen. We ripped it down to the bare walls, and in some cases even further. It was by far the biggest home improvement project we have undertaken to date. I've learned quite a bit through this entire process. For one thing, contractors are a pain in the ass. A necessary evil none the less. Most of our new cabinetry came from Ikea. We shopped around until we decided we liked the look and the quality of the parts. I have photo-documented the entire ordeal. Overall I could not be more pleased with how it all turned out.

Next on the list is our fantastic voyage to Canada. This whole thing started when Rob, our good pal from England, wanted to come over for a 10 day visit. We were trying to decide what to do while he was here. The plan was, hey, none of us have actually driven to Canada before. Why not give that a try! We took Interstate 35 north from the cities and took highway 61 up the Lake Superior lake front from Duluth. Our first overnight rest stop was in Grand Marais. From there we drove to Thunder Bay, were we stayed two nights in the fabulous accomdations in a Days Inn. While we were in town, we found a variety of things to do out of doors. We chartered a 90 minute sail boat cruise around the harbor. We walked accross Canada's longest suspension bridges. This one was particularly difficult for me as I'm not a big fan of falling to my squishy death. I'm glad we did it. The rest of the stops were at various national parks and waterfalls.

We are just past the half-way point for the year. There is so much more to do yet this year. Coming up in a week is the Minnesota State Fair. I'm always a big fan of that. Can't get enough of that Vitamin G.

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:17:00 -0500

Finally got my 360 back from MS. That only took an entire month! They did not even fix my old 360. They simply sent me a new-ish one as a replacement. Looking at the label on the new 360 I see that is was manufactured in June of 2006. So it's not brand spanking new. I hope they at least replaced the heat sinks in this one with the new ones I've been hearing about. I guess I'll find out after some marathon gaming sessions.

I wasted some time last week watching the E3 coverage on G4. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It is the big summer trade show for the video game industry. They basically lay out all the games that should be out for the following holiday season. As usual 75% of the games released in a year come out during the Christmas months. G4 does an okay job with the coverage. At least I recorded the entire expo on the DVR. That allowed me to fast forward through games I couldn't give a flying fart about.

Most upcoming games I'm looking forward to, are all coming out on the 360. The PS3 is still in for a world of hurt. Here is the short list:

Halo 3
Bioshock
Mass Effect
Grand Theft Auto 4
Assassin's Creed

On the Wii, I only have Mario Galaxy, and possibly Metroid 3 took look forward to. There is also a fitness game coming amazingly titled, Wii Fit. What makes that title interesting is that it comes with a balance board thing that you use to exercise on. My increasing butt size might want to keep an eye on that one.

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:57:00 -0500

My Xbox 360 has given me the dreaded red ring of death. The red ring of death is when you turn your 360 on and instead of the normal logo on your tv, you are greated with 3 blinking red lights on the front of the 360. The cause of the red lights is unknown to anyone outside of Microsoft. It basically means your source of game goodness is trashed and needs to be replaced. Crap. I called up jolly MS on the phone and was told since my system was out of warranty, I would need to cough up $140 bucks of hard earned bread to get my system fixed. Double crap. I've only had my 360 for little over a year now. I'm not alone here. Many others are having the same problems as me. Even the guy at the UPS store told me he sees plenty of the 360 coffin (the so called box you get to ship your dead xbox back to MS in). Various polls around the net have some people reporting returns of three or more times. How this defect rate is not making bigger news around the net amazes me. If anything, MS is a ninja at keeping this a secret.

Oh well, I have my Wii to keep my company for the next few weeks as I wait for my 360 to return. At least I was able to complete the main quest line in Oblivion before it croaked. In fact, that is probably what did it in. Because of that game I was putting more hours on the 360. The problems are most likely heat related as longer play times cause the system to run very hot.

Thu, 17 May 2007 13:07:00 -0500

Hi there!
Where the h-e-double hockey sticks have you been!?

It has been busy around home base here. We have quite a-lot going on lately. I'll cover that in future posts as we complete the goals we set out for this summer. OOoooo, so secretive he is. MMMmmmm.

What I have accomplished lately was adding a RSS feed to this page. You can now grab my blog with your favorite feed reamer.. err... I mean reader. RSS Use the link here in your favorite RSS reader. I prefer the very slick Google Reader.

Things at CodeWeavers have been going very well. Our Mac product is doing nicely. I'm quite pleased with how well things have turned out this last year. We still have plenty of work cut out for us.

I recently signed Kirby up for his own page at Dogster. You can see his page here. Dogster is like MySpace, but for Dogs. If your dog wants to be a pup-pal with the Kirbster, feel free to do so.

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 14:30:00 -0500

Spring is almost here. Finally, cabin fever is almost over. My butt and gut have grown over the winter. Since our big Seattle Sutton extravaganza this is the most weight I've put on. Somewhere around 15 lbs over the winter. Yikes! I'm looking forward to getting back outside around the lake on the blades. Speaking of blading, I took Kirby out for a small run with the blades. We had one awesome day last week where it got up to 80F. Kirby was a little afraid of the blades. He kept up with me, but he made sure he was not going to get very close to the wheels. A few more times of going out should hopefully cure him of that.

We picked up a Cannon S3 IS from Newegg this week. This camera is a decent upgrade from our Cannon A80. Specs are: 6.0 megapixel, 12x optical zoom, Digic III chip, image stabilization, and ISO 800 support. The S3 lays somewhere between a digital SLR and a point and shoot. The lens is much better than the A80 for example, but you can't change lenses like you can say on a Rebel SLR. This is about as much camera as I think I need. So most of our gallery pictures from this point on should be from this camera. The deal from Newegg was nice, they threw in a 1 gig SD card, a camera bag, and a tripod.

Check out my Twitter blog. Twitter basically is a mini-blog that you update in real time. I have my IM configured so I can simply IM that blog directly. Major blog updates I will still make to this site. But what I'm currently up to from minute to minute can be found there.

Last weekend I put in some good time on the Xbox 360. I managed to finish off three games over the weekend. Gears of War, Condemned: Criminal Origins, and Tomb Raider Legend. I started playing Oblivion as well. I am still not sure if I will get back into World of Warcraft anytime soon.

Back to the fun!

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:08:00 -0600

A new theme! Today I "got'er did" the theme for this site. It is the same layout basically, just with a slightly different look. I also updated the pictures used for the random photo on the home page. I grabbed a few of my favorites from various albums. The old images were almost 10 years old. I don't think I look that different, but I agree, they did need an update.

This weekend we were hit by a large snowstorm. I didn't take an exact measurement, but I would say there is about 14 inches of snow. A perfect chance to test out our new snowblower. Okay, not new new, but new to us. I added a few photos for your viewing pleasure.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:10:00 -0600

MAME the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. I found myself regaining interest in this venerable emulator again. It's been so long since I updated my MAME environment that most of my roms where invalid and had to be updated. MAME is up to version .112 right now, the last version I was using was .85. What got me interested in MAME again was there is a new build for linux called sdlmame. Finally a build for Linux that can actually run well. Sorry, but old xmame was just crap. I could never get it configured to run as well as Mame32 on Windows.

The downside of the Linux build is there is no GUI like in Mame32. Fortunately there are plenty of Front-Ends available. The one I found is called Wah!Cade. This is by far the best front end I've tested so far. So very customizable. Best of all, it is all controled via your joystick. It is really designed to be run from an arcade cabinet. As you see in the screenshot here, I made my own custom 1680x1050 widescreen layout for it. Wah!Cade also supports separate layouts for each emulator. I hit a button on my joystick and change to the SNES and Genesis game lists. Very very slick!

Someday the true goal is to build a stand up MAME arcade cabinet. For now, I'm happy using my X-Arcade joystick. I'm currently researching what is needed to build a cabinet. I'll post more in the future as I get closer to this goal.

The PS3 still sits un-used right now. Not exactly the best $600 I've ever spent. I really don't think anything much will happen with the PS3 this year. I've also been so wrapped up with MAME stuff lately that I have not logged into World of Warcraft in over 2 weeks. I think I needed a break from that addiction anyway.

I just noticed this is my 52nd blog post. Umm.. woo! ...or something. This means the code to jump to the next page of blog posts finally kicks in. The limit being 50 posts per page. Heh, only 2 - 3 more years until the next page is complete.

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 10:24:00 -0600

Lots of stuff to post today. This really should be like 4 separate posts, but hey, it's my dang site. Shut yer trap! First off. Welcome to the New Year, only a month late. All I can say is wow! Is it really 2007 already? I was still just getting used to 2006. It still had that new year smell.

Christmas was excellent as always. We had another successful "Newman Holiday Extravaganza". Big BIG thanks go out to everyone that stopped by for some winter cheer. The surprise HIT at this years party was the Nintendo Wii. Friends and neighbors hooted and hollered while rounds of Wii Sports Tennis and Bowling were played. It was amazing to witness.

In January, my good friend Rob came over from England for a week. Just in time to catch our best snow of the year. Up to this point, we hardly had any to speak of. We all went downhill inner-tubing at this hill in Wisconsin. The hill had a tow rope, so you could just grab on and not have to walk up the hill. Being pulled up was almost as fun as sliding down. I had many flashbacks of Calvin and Hobbes flying sleds of of hills. The snow was really coming down that night. Fresh powder and tubes == many face washes. My beard had icicles hanging off of it by the end of the night.

Speaking of icicles, it has been butt cold out the last week. We are talking temps dropping below -15F, with windchill reaching -30F. Colder than a Witches titty for certain. I guess we still can get a real Winter here in MN.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade was finally released this month. Finally I can level up my main character Splortch from level 60 to level 70. Granted, I only just made level 60 a few months ago. Some have been waiting to level up 60s for over a year. Contain your aggro kids. I also joined a new guild back in early December. Keel Haul. They are a great group. Thanks Dana and Deb. You pirates rock! Yaaar!

Lastly, I broke down and bought a PS3. At this point they are in stock everywhere. Hard to believe only two months ago these things were going for up to $2500 on eBay. I thought the regular price of $600 was high. Ouch! To get the PS3 I finally cashed in the pocket lint money I have been hanging onto for the last 10 years. I had about 50lbs of silver coin that I took to the bank and had just enough to get the PS3. At the moment there really are no good games for the PS3. I'm thinking of the PS3 as more of a media center system than a game system these days. I have no idea how the war between HD-DVD and PS3 will turn out. So having both the HD-DVD add-on for the 360 and the PS3 will allow me to not worry about which will win this stupid format war and just buy the movies I want to see in HD. It will be a long time until downloadable movies reach the quality of the HD disks. I'm not sure Sony will recover in the game market. I only see 2 game coming on the PS3 that interest me in the next year. Metal Gear Solid 4, and Rachet and Clank. At this point I feel the 360 is winning the next-generation (now current generation) battle. Microsoft is putting forth a good effort, and the 360 is really a fantastic all around gaming system. The PS3 has a lot of catching up to do.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:58:00 -0600

Check us out! This is Karen and I in Mii form. Aren't we just adorable? Well, at least Karen is. Sorry about the bad quality photo. It is the best I can do with my Cannon pointed at my TV in low light with a flash. You can actually just have fun creating Mii people for everyone you know. The best part is that everyone you create will appear in Wii sports as opposing players or background fans.

I've been playing with my Wii for the last few days and the more I use it the more I enjoy it. Getting off my arse to stand and play some active games is just good times in the making. The only downer is that I have been unable to find a second Wiimote. So Kitten and I just take turns with Wii Sports and Excite Truck. There has not even been any stamping of the feet or crying or anything.

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 23:23:00 -0600

Wii

After my third attempt at waiting in line at Best Buy I finally manged to snatch up a Wii for myself. As Stimpy would say, "Happy Happy Joy Joy!". My first attempt was last Sunday on the launch day. I was under the impression there would be enough consoles to go around so I only arrived 20 min prior to store opening. Needless to say, I underestimated demand. The Best Buy employees already handed out tickets before I even got there. No dice. Next I thought I would camp out on Black Friday starting at 3:30 am to get a Wii. WRONG! No consoles that day. According to a Best Buy yellow shirt they were holding the shiny white Wii back until Sunday. FRICK! Well, Sunday it is then. This time I was not going to hold back, I arrived at the gates the the blue devil at 6:20 am. Store opening would be at 10 am. It was going to be a long cold wait, but at least I met some nice and interesting people in line. I was number 11 in line. YES. At 9 am an Angel with a yellow ticket name badge handed my golden, err blue, ticket. Finally!

My Wii Launch Lineup:

Wii Consoles use a System code as a way to contact friends online. If you want to add my Mii to your Wii just add my code to your Wii address book:

6979 6251 0093 9066

I spend a good chunk of time today playing my Wii games. About 5 hours in total. The Wii actually reports and tracks your game playing time. A nifty feature. So far I am very impressed with the controls. Everything is easy and intuitive. It just feels "right" to me. Nintendo is onto something big here.