blueZhift Blog

Hurray for pink haired girls! I saw my first pink haired woman outside of an anime convention today, a nice highlight to an otherwise cold dreary day in Chicago. The most interesting thing about it was that it looked pretty good, so kudos to Sakura!

Pfffffft! Just another blah blah Monday for me as I work off the Thanksgiving hangover and get back on my diet after a weekend of relative excess. All of the talk of sales on and offline though, has inspired me to update my sites in hopes of snagging some commissions along with the sheer fun of creating some new themes. And on the development front, now that my main computer is back online, I’ve finally had a chance to sink my teeth into XNA Game Express and want to build up my main site with some XNA focus. While I haven’t completely abandoned Flash, the appeal of getting content on a console without too much hacking cannot be ignored. And Microsoft probably makes the best development tools in the business, serious developer bait indeed!

Today the Xbox Live Marketplace begins selling TV shows and movies that can be downloaded and watched on the Xbox 360. My 360 is connected to my flatscreen computer monitor since I wanted HD, but still cannot bring myself to paying $1K USD for an HDTV. So I was initially lukewarm to the idea of watching TV and movies on my computer monitor. But since my home office has been exiled to the bedroom, watching shows on the Xbox 360 makes a little more sense now. So I may give this a shot, especially since the PC monitor is bigger than the old TV in the room and I have a better sound system attached to the Xbox. If this becomes popular, I think Microsoft is going to need to introduce a hard drive upgrade option. The current 20GB drive is looking smaller and smaller everyday. I think either an upgrade option and/or a network storage service would be the way to go. A 60GB drive to match the PS3′s premium offering would suit me just fine.

Downloadable shows on the 360 opens up a new front in the battle for the living room. While Apple is in the fight with downloadable shows for the iPod, they do not yet have a big screen presence in the living room, though it is coming. Right now, the first one to feel the heat may be TiVo which I think has plans for downloadable shows, but now will be playing catch up to Microsoft whose Xbox 360 is also much cheaper than the $800 TiVo Series 3. Another potential victim could be Sony’s Blu-ray movie format if Microsoft and others manage to popularize HD downloads making physical media, including HD DVD, irrelevant.

In the end though, it won’t matter if the shows available suck! So I’ll be interested to see what kind of lineup greets me when I login tonight.

Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat! Nothing up my sleeve! Rooooar!

That’s how this whole computer repair/upgrade thing has felt. I swallowed my pride and returned yet another nonfunctional motherboard and this time returned the CPU too. And finally, it looks like I have functioning system once again! I won’t go on about some of the insane default BIOS settings (like silent boot) or having to call Microsoft to get permission to activate Windows again, or even essentially having to reinstall XP plus SP2 and patches patches patches!!! I’m just happy that the ordeal is almost over.

This time for sure!

Right now my home PC which I depend on for some day job work and general coding fun, is in pieces under my desk… <\3 As near as I can tell, the old Athlon XP finally gave up the ghost resulting in many crashes to the beeps of death. Little did I know that my mourning was to be long and painful.

Generally, I've always liked doing upgrades and moving on to something better. But this time, the ugliness that is tech, sometimes, bit me squarely in the ass. Right now I'm working on my 3rd motherboard and 2nd power supply. I haven't thrown the Pentium D 805 over the side just yet, but it may be next (more about the 805). Part of the problem I ran into was that while I was happy with my old system, the world moved on by and even the m*f*n power supply specs changed. This is what I think caused the no POST problem with the first two boards I tried. Unfortunately, nothing in the sparse documentation made mention of the power supply. Later I learned that I would need an ATX 12V power supply, what I didn’t know though was I would need a ATX 12V version 2.0 and not the version 1.3 I’d just brought home! I’ve been so frustrated with this whole component compatibility and quality issue, that this may be the last box I build myself. I just don’t have the time for this sort of thing anymore!
It is now many miles and many days later that I now have what I think is the right power supply and hopefully I can get my rig back up sooner rather than later. WillowBrow’s PC and trackball just do not get along with me and the kids computer isn’t any better. So me and my XBox 360 have been having a little more quality time than usual lately! Still, I really want to get back to my virtual home.

A couple of days ago I received notice that my Japanese Flashcards gadget had been accepted for inclusion to the Google Gadgets library. Yaay! I’ve been Googlefied. My Google developer’s t-shirt, hat, and a pen were delivered to my office this morning. These are small trinkets, but in my world, the world of geeks and nerds, these are great badges of honor.

A few years ago, when I got swept out the door in a wave a tech bubble burst and overseas outsourcing, I wasn’t feeling too good about being a software developer. It seemed like it didn’t have any value anymore. But yesterday, during my walk, I realized that most people can’t do what I do, and there is still a need for it. But most importantly, I still love doing it. I’m still hoping to get rich by writing that next great little thing (can’t give away the store here yet), but the fun is still much more important to me.

My Google Gadget should show up in their library in a week or two. I’ll post a link when it does.

Update:

The gadget just went live in the library! Click here.

Winds howled and whipped up a white foamy froth on Lake Michigan this morning. It was beautiful and I was so happy just to be alive.

A new study has determined that only 1% of web pages are porn! Darn! Now I know why it is so hard to find anything good! :3

Might as well begin the week with some shameless self promotion! Here’s a little Google Gadget that I originally wrote for their recent gadget contest. It’s really a lightweight version of its .Net big brother, Proliphus JFC, but this one includes the diacritics too. I’m hoping to add sound and card printing once I get some more time. You can also get this and more on my Widgets Etc. page. Enjoy!

Description

The Japanese flashcards gadget displays the Hiragana and Katakana character sets. Clicking a card will display its Romaji name. Cards may be displayed in order or optionally shuffled.

This gadget uses unicode to display Japanese characters and should work on any system that supports Google Desktop and unicode.

Click here to download.

Like a thief in the night, the PS3 has launched in Japan! Over the last few days, I’ve been so distracted by family matters (which culminated in the loss of my office/playroom to my eldest daughter, waaah) that the PS3 had completely fallen off of my radar screen. Now that I have a little time, I’ll be very interested in finding whatever news there is of the quality of the games and the console hardware. Right now the thing I find hardest to believe is a PS3 Japanese launch with a paltry 100K units. That’s like a NASCAR race that begins under the green and yellow flags, usually to beat the rain. The lap counter has started, but it’s not very exciting. Of course don’t say that to rabid fanboys like these, plenty of people are out hoping and praying that they will be lucky enough to score a PS3.