Pretty Sassy

So excited.  Put my down payment on the WII Board at ebgames. 

The Wii Board is for use with the WII and utilizes a bunch of sensors to figure out your center of gravity.  The result is you can do crazy things like jogging, hitting virtual soccar balls with your head and tight rope walking.

At $89.00 for the unit and WiiFit I am buying it as a way to get my games in and get a little fitness on the way.  I loved Wii Sports and I hope this is just as cool.  Some girls dream of diamonds, I dream of Wii.

So excited. 

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_fit
Official Website: http://www.nintendo.com/wiifit/en/#/home/
EB Games: http://www.ebgames.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?product_id=69536

I’ve always been a music/audio book freak, in college I schlepped a huge CD(the double wide kind binder between home, work and school.  I couldn’t function without my groove and my my mix cd’s.  I also gave a lot of mix cd’s out to friends and family and my mixes(especially made for you) we’re one of my signature things. 

But then ipods got big and mixing seemed silly since you no longer had to edit.  You suddenly could carry 1000 songs in your pocket and much like this blog, no editing was necessary.  After all with the Shuffle function you could listen to every song you owned on random play. 

Except, see I’m moody.  Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m melancholy and at the gym I mean heart pounding heavy metal, hip hop business.

I still appreciate the joy of the mix tape (now an ipod playlist), but I don’t always have the time to make them at the speed I appreciate.

If you are running into a new genre of music and looking for a cd-sized playlist itunes essentials are collections of songs in specific genres or artists.  It’s nice if you don’t have enough music in a genre, but what do you do if you have the songs, but not the enthusiasm?

Enter stage left, The Filter.  This is a nifty FREE application by Exabre.  After signing up for the service and downloading the application it turns on and you select several songs from your library and based on genre and beats and magic it pops up a playlist.

You can also let it random pick a list, but I prefer a little control.

Downsides?  I like big (60-90 song) playlists.  If it can’t find enough songs to fill a playlist, there will be some repeats.

I got the link to this casual game via NotMartha.org

It’s called Chain Factor.  It’s what would happen if connect 4, Tetris and Sudoku had some sort of baby together.  It’s free and web-based.

It’s a really good game to play to wind yourself down before bed.

Read Red Ring of Death background here

Mister here (AKA Kelly’s husband). Kelly wants me to do an occasional post to her blog– so here’s the first

Since Kelly has not told me what to write about I thought I’d start of with my recent Xbox 360 experiences. I got the Xbox 360 the day it was released (actually a day late -UPS screwed up the delivery, but that’s a whole ‘nother story) I’ve read about the “Red Ring of Death” many people were experiencing since its release. I figured I was one of the lucky ones since I’ve gone more than 2 years without any issues with the system. With 20-20 hindsight I realize now that it’s because I didn’t play it that often– no more than 1-2 hours at time and usually less than that.

So what caused the revelation? Simple, I got Mass Effect I started playing it over the New Year’s holiday — and couldn’t stop playing it — much to Kelly’s chagrin.  Chores got skipped, wife and dogs got ignored– I had gone into Video Game Mode. I think I clocked about 20 hours of play time over 72 hours. And that was all it took. Last week I tried to startup my game– got to the title screen– and it locked up. Reboot. 3 red lights. My worst nightmare….

So I began the work to get my 360 repaired– Fortunately Microsoft extended the warranty for this issue to 3 years, so I was covered. I realized later that I could have done all of this online, but the phone route was relatively painless.  They took my name address, etc., told me I’d get a prepaid box to ship the console out in about 3 days and that the repair would take 3-4 weeks. Wait, a month without an Xbox 360? I haven’t finished Mass Effect yet! But where one sees problems I see opportunity. You see, I have a fairly up-to-date A/V setup: A nice Sony AV receiver with HDMI inputs, a 1080p DLP HDTV with HDMI inputs…. What to do?

A: Wait 4 weeks to get my 360 repaired and maintain the status quo

or

B: Convince Kelly that we need to upgrade the XBOX 360 to the HDMI model…

Can you guess I chose B?  

So I got myself a new Xbox 360 with HDMI out. But we agreed to send out the bust 360 and eBay it when it got back.

So I go the shipping box late last week.. a small white box without any distinguishing markings, inside it was packing material and instructions to send it out. So I dutifully packed it up and went down to UPS store near our apartment to drop it off. And this is where I get my mind blown– I take the plain white box, shipping label towards me into the UPS store and the clerk looks at me and says — “Oh we can take your Xbox, but we don’t give shipping receipts for it.” She knew it was and Xbox return just by the box! I’m not sure if she was exaggerating but she later told me that they get up to 10 of those A DAY!

So all is good now. I have a an Xbox that works (plus the upgrade ) and am waiting for the repaired Xbox so I can sell it on EBay

So a few weeks ago I downloaded another Shockwave Game “Burger Island”

And I really hate the game.  It’s very picky, a finger masher, buggy controls, stupidly complex, repetitive to the point of no fun and scores like a nightmare.

The thing is I’ve decided that I have to be better than the game.  That I am a better person than the game.

The game has no plot but making burgers with gazillion toppings.  Or maybe fries or shakes.  It’s stupid and annoying.  But I play anyway.

I hate it.  But I play it.  I think this is how mental illness starts.

Last month the Mister and I were on an aniversary getaway in Frisco on a misty day after being stuck on a stuck trolly for an hour soaked to our socks.  The net effect should have been cold and miserable but it wasn’t.  It was sort of sweet in the way only San Francisco can be sweet.  It was pleasantly melancholy.  We ended up stopping at a drugstore to by geek food (whoppers, chex mix, soda and hot cocoa) to keep us alive through the night and stopped at a gamestop to by the CSI Game Hard Evidence.

After drying off and warming back up we plunked it into our laptop(you don’t actually think we could survive without them, do you?)  And we played.  And oh man was it fun.

You play a gumshoe detective trying to solve crimes.  There are two women who like to light things on fire, snubbed cabbies, dying rich men trying to get a slew of women pregnant with the hope of a male heir(because according to Mr. Rich, girls don’t count).  There are also cool cut scenes that show actual CSI footage, decent but not fantastic visual characters.  HP Computers clearly made a deal with the game as all of the computers you use in the game to analyze evidence are HP. 

And Grissom, you get private time with Grissom.  And in my book time with Grissom is never a bad thing.  Even if it’s just to go over case notes and it’s not even the actual Grissom but a computer generated one and you ran into a bug where Grissoms “skin” disapeared an he was a robot head with human eyes and teeth and your mister goes “ewwwe, that guy was ugly when he had skin, now without….”.  It’s still Grissom.   OK?

From reading amazon.com game reviews for the other games in the CSI family, there have been a lot of show stopping, sev-1, priority 1 bugs in the CSI Series.  Unlike the previous games, Hard Evidence’s whodunnit cases appears to be less buggy as long as you have a solid machine for playing.  A lot of reviewers complain that with only 5 whodunnit cases it’s a bit short.  I agree.  Sometime somewhere a rule of thumb was created that the number of dollars you pay for a game should be the number of hours you spend playing the game.  I played it through in about 10 hours.  And I’m sure there are techie girls and boys that could polish this bad boy off in 3 or 4 hours.  So when you buy the box you’re paying more per hour than say the game Oblivion.

In the past several months podcasts have started to mature in a way that is giving them a lot more validity.  A year ago most podcasts seemed horribly corporatized or so amatuer that they were impossible to listen to.

Part of it is that several respected players (Leo Laport and many well loved NPR shows) hooked up with iTunes for professional content made highly accessible and updatable.

I had been avoiding podcasts for the longest time until I read this post by Meg of notmartha.org showing some of her cooler finds for the podcasts.  I decided to try podcasting again.  It’s been love ever since.

From NPR I love to listen to:
This American Life
The Splendid Table

From TWIT(Leo Laport’s company)
The Tech Guy(The syndicated radio show): A show that’s primarily technology callin/answer.  The mister loves this one.
Munchcast: Cami Blackstone and Leo Laport dish dirt on geek food. 

FlyLady:
Okay, you know how I just complained about amatuerish radio.  But this podcast has it’s charms and it’s place.  Flylady is author and runs a website about getting your life and home in order in a few dabs of 15 minutes a day.  The geek girl population does not feel like the key audience(that seems to be overwhelmed mothers), but the sentiments are right on.   The show is a little dorky for the wired set, but just like the Disney ride “It’s a small world”, you feel happier after all is done and said.  The podcast is a callin format where overwhelmed women call in for advice.  Flylady Marla Cilley and cohost Dinner Dive are sincere and seem to take a lot of joy in helping.  Think of it like Oprah without the production budget.   

Lipgloss and Laptops:
This was the podcast that got me all started.  Lipgloss and Laptops is two canadian women who write reviews about beauty products, makeup and life.  It’s really fun and well put together.  The women have no budget restrictions so crazy expensive night cream might be compared in the same show as Wet and Wild lipstick.

 Podcasts Rock!
Kelly

When I heard the name Odiogo a few weeks ago I thought..  Huh?  Carmen Sandiego?  Beloved video game of the sweet, sweet Apple IIe.  I not only loved the game Carmen Sandiego, I also loved the TV Show of  the same name on PBS.

But Odiego is not Carmen Sandiego.  It’s an audible blog reader.  So instead of just subscribing to a blog rss feed and READING it, you can download and listen to it on your ipod or computer. 

I just registered for the free service at http://www.odiogo.com.  After some necessary configuration on Odiogo’s side, they provided me with an email of how to integrate odiogo into my blog.  Pretty sweet.

****Beware.  Nerd Talk!!
The technology uses text-to-speech.  This means that the blog is converted into voice in realtime.  Theoretically.  Actually it appears from the faq that odiogo crawls it’s rss feeds every few hours and converts the text into speech and turns it into an mp3 file that it posts to it’s servers. 
*****End of Nerd Talk!!!

The voice is male and a little dry and ever so gently downtrodden and serious.  Sort of like a cnn newscast about shoeless puppies.  When it trips over wacky spelling it spells the word letter by letter.  It’s pretty smooth, but definitely isn’t perfect.

The fact that I have a cnn-sounding voice at my disposal makes me want to make it say things like “dork pants” and ”I am a weasel head”.  But I wouldn’t do that because that is improper.

Right now it seems that only a handful of blogs use Odiogo which is sad.  Because the idea of getting all your favorite blogs sent onto your ipod every morning for commute time would be a real timesaver.

But the question I really have is this.  What the heck does the word Odiogo mean?

I HEART Shockwave games.  Shockwave.com is an online publisher of casual for games.  For around $60.00 a year I get unlimited access to download any of there hundreds of casual games.

See for me and others like me, casual games are sort of like crack.  They are all very easy to pickup and understand, horribly repetitive, provide a lot of positive feedback.   Mastering something simple, that seems slightly complex is always soul-drenching satisfying after a long day.  So basically you get hooked when you play and when you lose.  It’s like really cheap slot machines.

I love Burger Rush because it is like the childhood game Build a Better Burger that my parents never purchased me.  I am still sad by that.  The game was designed to train young, fertile minds how to handle the rigors of a burger assembly line.  I imagine the game was designed by the burger industry as early training.  

But I wanted this game, badly.   I fantasized how fun it would be to follow the process of making a better burger(and fries, soda and shakes!!).  I also badly wanted to show the neighbor girls my mad cooking skillz.  Look at the box(above), do you see how much fun those kids are having?  And is it just me or does the boy on the left look like the kid from the 80’s TV Show “Small Wonder”?   Remember “Small Wonder”?  It was a show about a robotics engineer who builds a girl named V.I.K.I who talks like a robot(”do you want me to dismantle the dog?) and learns the softer side of life while teaching the world that robots are people too?  If you don’t remember that maybe you remember the red-haired neighbor who said “No, no, no, no, no, no”.  There was a dark haired boy in my sixth grade class that loved to say that all the time.  That kid was cool.

Where was I?  Oh yeah Burger Rush

See the game is part tetris-ish where you shuffle burger ingredients together(every trio you gather earns points and fills orders) in order to serve mad customers(French Mimes, Geeks, Grandmas, Space Cadets and Movie Stars).  You can add fries and sodas for bonus points. 

Shockwave offers a free trial of the game, but I will tell you this..  Because of it’s Tetris nature the game is like CRACK.  During gameplay the Mister would try to rip the laptop out of my hands for a quick fix.   I would tell him “No, no, no, no, no, no”.

I love casual games and this one mixes several categories(puzzles and simulation).