According to some quick Google work, the Earth’s orbit is pretty much a circle, and the diameter of said orbit fluctuates somewhere between 294 and 304 million kilometers.
So, split the difference and call it 299 million kilometers, or 185.79 million miles. Multiply that by pi and you get 583.68 million miles. Which means, on this day, effective at I-think-it-was 3:41AM (obviously, Mom wasn’t aimed towards a clock at point of entry, and I was too busy getting smacked on the ass to check my watch anyhow), I have completed roughly 20.4288 billion miles of travel on this planet.
(And when YOU need to complete many miles of travel, why not do so on United Airlines? Page…two!)
And to celebrate this banner day (and feed my incredible hubris), George Lucas has decided to remove his head from his ass and allow the DVD release of the original, unadulterated Star Wars trilogy. Two-disc sets, actually: one disc with the remastered and bastardized version that was re-released in 2004, and one with the original in all of its grainy goodness.
And this works well for me, mainly because while the rest of the world is complaining that they’re gonna have to buy the trilogy Yet Again to get these, I didn’t buy them in the first place; I turned up my nose and said “Call me when the REAL movies are out.” And apparently it’s gonna pay off. So, nice.
Everyone’s trumpeting how Han Solo will finally shoot first again, but that’s really a misnomer, since in the original, Greedo never shot in the first place. Yep, finally an entirely new generation will get to see Han as he really was: a cold-blooded killer. Sam Jackson has nothing on my boy; I don’t care HOW many lightsabers he has that say Bad Mother Fucker on them.
Let me point out, before we continue, that the code name for the project, the Nintendo “Revolution”, was a perfectly suitable one and very much in line with Nintendo’s philosophy of continual innovation and development of new video game experiences. There’s no reason they couldn’t have just gone with that.
So, now that that’s out of the way, dig this: It will be called the “Wii.” At first glance, I thought this was pronounced “why” as in “Why in the blue hell would I want to buy this?” I was wrong. It’s pronounced “we.” Or “wee.” Yeah, that’s MUCH better.
In searching Yahoo to find the news item I linked above, it asked me “Did you mean “nintendo wifi?” Google interprets it correctly, but still, this is not what you want your product name to do in a search engine.
“Hey, Billy, do you wanna come over this weekend? I just got some more ChinPokeMon!” “Nope, I’m gonna stay home and play with my Wii.”
“Mommy! Let’s go to Best Buy! I wanna Wii!”
“Put this disc in your Wii, let’s see what happens.”
On the upside: it’s marketing decisions like this that make my decision to get on the Xbox 360 bandwagon look that much wiser. I wouldn’t have bought a Revolution anyhow, but NOBODY is gonna buy a friggin’ Wii. If the Sony folks would just announce when the Asstastic Buttsnoggler is gonna hit stores the cycle will be complete.
Some of the very poorest “journalism” found online today is in the video game arena, filled for the most part with way-too-hip twentysomethings who turn their nose up at Pong and Combat because the graphics aren’t up to snuff. Every so often you will see one of them crap out an “OMG MOST IMPORTANT GAMES OF ALL TIME!!!!111!!ELEVEN” list that is just a waste of perfectly good drive space because if it didn’t happen on a console made before the first Nintendo Entertainment System, it didn’t exist. Nolan Bushnell? Who’s that? Didn’t he run a pizza chain once?
The story may be an ugly one, but you’ll find yourself with a new appreciation of modern consoles after hearing of the blunders Philips made with its first — and last — voyage into the gaming industry.
Unfortunately, I can’t take very much of the credit at all…much of the heavy lifting was done by my friends Rich and Jesse. Rich did the majority of the graphical work and came up with the layout, and Jesse helped me out with some HTML issues (and when you’re me, you have a LOT of HTML issues), and to them I owe my heartfelt thanks, and probably a dinner, or at least a batch of cookies.
So, thanks much, guys. My appreciation for and awe in your vast talents are overwhelming. There’s no way I could have put together something this snazzy by myself.
(Oh, and tomorrow’s my mom’s birthday! Happy Birthday, Mom! Hopefully the Sharks will bring home a Game Four victory tomorrow night as a gift. :))
Okay, here’s another one for the geeks in the house.
(“All the ladies in the place say HOOOOO!” “Hooooooooo!” “All the geeks in the place recite pi to 127 places!” “3.141592653….”)
First, a little background: I have this spiffy universal remote that I picked up a while back. It does everything, and because I’m a geek, I made it do a little more; I hacked a JP1 connector into it and soldered a TEENY TINY EEPROM chip to the circuit board so I can program it through my computer. (To this day I don’t know how I pulled off the solder job.)
Well, last week, I took the plunge and bought myself an early birthday present (May 4th, kids, mark your calendars), an Xbox 360. And it occurred to me, as I saw the $30 remote they wanted to sell me so I could have full DVD remote functionality instead of controlling it with the wireless gamepad, that perhaps someone has posted the JP1 codes and I can just program my spiffy hax0red remote to do it and save a few bucks.
So I do some Googling and subsequent checking of the relevant forums, and lo and behold, the 360 Remote Master codes are indeed out there. So I download the file, build the upgrade, and upload it into the remote.
And it works fine…until I try to open the DVD tray, at which point it does nothing until I close the tray manually or use the gamepad to close the tray using the Xbox dashboard. And I’m stymied. I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve done something wrong putting together the remote upgrade, and I post in a panic to the aforementioned relevant forums.
Tonight, I’m playing with it some more (I found a new upgrade with some more functionality, so I figure maybe it has a different open/close tray code), and having the same problem. And folks have since replied to my panicked posts, swearing up and down, to a man, that it’s worked for every one of them and that I’m doing it just right. Well, apparently NOT, since the damn tray won’t close, right?
Oh. Wait.
The vantage point I’m doing these experiments from is above the unit and to the right, as it is located in the storage cubes that flank my television, and I’m sitting at my computer desk.
Go back and look at the picture of the unit again. See that little dark oval on the lower left? That’s the infrared sensor for the remote. The DVD drive tray is the long chrome slot above that.
Guess what gets completely obstructed from an angle of above and to the right when the DVD tray is open?
So I’m reading my RSS feed of the local Fry’s Electronics ad today, and an ad for a Crock Pot caught my eye (‘cuz I’ve been looking for a bigger one than the teeny one I have now).
More remarkable, though, is the toaster to its left:
Perfect pizza rolls AND a clean smooth face? Where do I sign?
(‘Scuse me if I don’t take advantage of the “fully immersible in water” feature, though.)
