Let's have a grab bag of topics, shall we? Yes, we shall! 1) My weekend was fantastic, how was yours? We had a Game Day on Saturday and got to play some of the new games I received for Christmas and generally had a good time. We played Pandemic (we won!), Shadows Over Camelot (the good guys won!), and Give Me the Brain! (I won!). Huh. Just realized I was on the winning side in all three games that day. That doesnt' happen often. Both of the cooperative games were nailbiters though. Then on Sunday Karin and I went to see the Monsters of Podcasting show with a live Jordan, Jesse Go! and You Look Nice Today. This was all part of the San Francisco Sketchfest which is a festival I can endorse. Both shows were hilarious. We were going to eat at Speisekammer in Alameda, which would have been a very fine thing indeed but then last week Paul and Storm mentioned eating at Great Eastern on Jackson Street, which was just four blocks from the MoP venue, so we tried it. It was stunningly good - the wonton soup with the crispy duck was just amazing. If you want Chinese food in San Franciso I'd highly recommend it. You may want to make a reservation, the place was packed on a Sunday night. Of course it was also the Lunar New Year so maybe it was abnormally packed. We had a reservation and the guy who came in right after us without a reservation didn't get a table until we were almost done eating. 2) The sucky thing about the weekend was Heisenberg's claws. He keeps getting something on his claws and if we don't clean them diligently they get infected. This time he got it really bad, so I had to take him to the vet on Monday. Which means he got sedated and generally had a bad day, he got an antibiotic shot and medicine we have to give him twice a day, and that was generally all around bad. The vet suggested we switch to a natural, organic litter, so we're trying a new litter made from corn instead of clay. While I was talking to the vet she wanted him to lose a bit more weight, so we're also going to try this fancy high-protetin, low-carb food. It's 50% protein and has no grains - just meat, fruit, and veggies. We'll see. Apparently cats do better if you don't feed them rice and wheat. Who knew? Anyhow the claw thing has been a pain for quite a while, so here's hoping the organic corn-based litter fixes what ails the poor guy. 3) Random other tidbit that I've been sitting on for a while. Here's an interview with Robbie Bach at CES, where they asked him about Blu-Ray on a 360. What I love is that he has this whole list of reasons why Blu-Ray on a 360 is a bad idea, but if you search and replace "Blu-Ray" with "HD-DVD" they would all make the exact same amount of sense. Personally I can only think of two reasons why MS is so opposed to Blu-Ray on a 360 and neither have anything to do with what the consumer wants or could benefit from. A ) Microsoft won't back a Sony-created format or B ) Microsoft wants to skip the HD disc media and move straight to download or streaming. As far as the latter goes - I've tried Netflix on the 360 and it's fine for old television shows but it's nowhere near HD. You can't stream HD in the US yet (bandwidth isn't there) and the 360 doesn't have the hard drive space for downloading real HD and it never will as long as they treat the hard drive as a profit center. Pushing for download is a bad move on their part because Sony can sell downloaded HD just as well on a PS3 but Sony gives you 3-4 times as much storage on the drive and uses a standard part you can upgrade yourself if you desire. But anyway if a drive can't be used in gaming, costs money, and consumers don't want it then it won't be available on a 360. Unless it's a HD-DVD drive of course.