Wow

Anyone who owns a Wii and doubts Nintendo's utter contempt for North America should go watch the Mario Sluggers promo on Wii (currently on the "Nintendo channel"), overdubbed by whatever AP didn't go to lunch on time the day the Smacker-encoded video arrived from Japan. Yeesh. The game itself might be fun, but fist-sized macro-blocks (not an exaggeration) and Buehler?-esque narration makes enthusiasm difficult. Which is peculiar, because even the Gamecube had better video codecs, and my assumption is that this video was built for Japan - where broadband is supposed to be faster than here.
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A Triumph of Materialism

Yesterday was a particularly successful day of technology acquisition. I ended up buying and configuring an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi + network storage for backups) as well as a Wii Fit. Of course setting all that up took a big chunk of time, but there you are. I needed to acquire some more data storage and I had been debating a Time Capsule or biting the bullet and getting a Drobo. But in the last week I had several network outages that ended up being fixed by rebooting the Airport Extreme (my router), so it seemed like the Extreme needed to be replaced. As a bonus that meant I could move the Extreme as a relay in my office (the iPhone has been having some problems lately getting a good signal when I'm in my office). The thing about configuring WiFi is it's always a mess. There are three nodes in the network - the new Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express (which also streams music to the kitchen). Getting the Time Capsule to replace the Extreme was pretty straightforward, but getting the Airport Express to reconfigure took well over an hour. And the frustrating thing is that I can't say what I did differently. I'd swear I configured it the exact same way three or four times and then suddenly the last time it went "Oh, you want me to join the existing network? I can do that." And the Time Capsule insisted that my previous WiFi password wasn't the correct length so I had to change the WiFi password and then go teach it to all of the relevant devices. Whee. But now I've got a Time Capsule and can backup Horton (the Mac Mini) and Lorax (my new laptop) using Time Machine. On Wii Fit, they are fairly difficult to find (surprise! Stupid Nintendo!) On our recent vacation we checked out a fair number of Wii games, and Wii Fit, which is only sort of a game. Karin ended up wanting WarioWare and a Wii Fit, and neither is very easy to find. (If you want WarioWare the only choice I found was ordering it from bestbuy.com. It wasn't in any local stores and it's not available from Amazon or Gamestop.com.) Several Amazon Marketplace stores are selling WarioWare at higher than MSRP, so it must be out of print. And what is up with that? If I grudgingly accept some sort of hardware issue with Wii supply and then with Wii Fit, but WarioWare? That's just a DVD for crying out loud! The Wii Fit had worked out that I was just calling a few stores every week and trying places like Target or Best Buy when I was there anyway. We were at Target on Sunday and I figured I'd ask in the electronics department and they seemed to have just discovered they had "two to four units" in the back. Which makes no freaking sense, but whatever. There was a guy already waiting for one, a girl asked for one while I was waiting for them to find the stock in the back. So if they had four they sold three of them before they could even get them. Frankly I have trouble believing that the Wii Fit board is tough to make. It's a neat piece of hardware, but there's nothing cutting-edge inside it. Nintendo really needs to stop screwing around and get their manufacturing sorted out. I'm done trying to guess what the problem is, but it's really getting ridiculous now. Having WarioWare not be in the stores is just absurd. They have plenty of shelf space in the stores for crappy third party titles, and it seems like WarioWare is a game that people might actually want.
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With Technology Figit

Good Lord, I've been as criminally negligent of this blog as it's possible to be criminally negligent of a personal blog. It's time for Technology Catch-Up(tm). Part the first: I bought Wii - I've had it about a month now. One part the Penny Arcade guys gushing over Boom Blox, one part some other technology fooling about making me realize that if I reconfigured the home theater just *SO* I could squeeze a Wii to the existing input and cables, and one part it finally being in a local store when I called and asked them. Verdict? Well, it turns out I can improve the sloppy control I complained so much about - set the sensitivity to "5" (the max) and it helps a lot. I still feel very strongly that you don't feel like you're pointing at the screen due to the ergonomics of the remote and you're driving a pointer around. The visceral "I'm pointing at the screen" doesn't work right, and whenever you need to do that it seems like there's a fair amount of "Just wave the remote until you get a cursor and then adjust from there." Boom Blox is a lot of fun despite that, and I've played an awful lot of Super Mario Galaxy in the last month. I still think it's a gimmick overall and I can't see it ever dethroning my 360 as my main console. But as I said in the comments here I don't think they are even competing really. I don't regret buying one, but I don't regret not having one for the last 1.5 years either. I haven't bought Zelda yet, but by the end of the summer I'll have blown through the back catalog and then the Wii will be like the Gamecube - hardly ever used except when Nintendo released a game every six months or so. That's not all on the technology parade. I'm going on vacation next week and I decided I wanted a new laptop before I went, so I got a 15" Macbook Pro. It's smaller and lighter than Kool-Aid, both of which will make it more airplane friendly. Kool-Aid needed at least a new battery, and it couldn't run the iPhone development software (needs an Intel Mac), and it was just getting a bit old for what I wanted to do. I'm still installing and configuring software but I like it a lot. As an odd aside Karin bought it with her educator discount and we got a free iPod touch in the bargain. Which brings us to the iPhone 2.0 software. I don't have any real desire to upgrade to the iPhone 3G as I already own a GPS and most of my iPhone network usage is via WiFi anyway. But the new software is full of awesome. The App Store is great and a lot of new applications are fantastic. I should post more about this. My biggest surprise so far is to realize I actively prefer reading RSS feeds on my phone and I opt for it even when I'm at home and could use Tiny God and the twin 24" screens. The phone forces me to triage more from article title and so far I'm not missing anything but getting through more items in less time. There's a lot of good stuff in the App Store. A metric shit-ton of crap as well, but there it is. The phone seems much less stable as well. I crash it several times a day now, as opposed to less than once a month. Most crashes seem to be right around app launch and it recovers gracefully but it's still a sour note.
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