Ned Yost, the current (and one of the best) managers the of the (my hometown Milwaukee) Brewers, is, according to Brewers.com, a "tech geek".
He also owns an iPhone. Which, is pretty sweet. While it seems the local sports media goes nuts and calls for his head whenever the Brewers lose a game, I think Yost is one of the best ever to manage (not coach, thats an important difference in baseball) for the Brew Crew. I wouldn't mind seeing him end up coaching in Milwaukee for 10 or 15 years, like some managers in some teams.
What the local sports radio guys seem to forget, is that the Brewers haven't finish above .500 for a season in 15 years, and are currently in first with 3 wins above .500.
Ned was one of my favorite Brewers team members, and one of the best managers. His status has a 'tech geek', like me, has only solidified this. I am now a Ned Yost defender.
Go Brewers.
So, my Xbox 360 red ringed today, and I thought my widely unused Vox blog would be a great place to document my attempts to get it fixed, hopefully via Microsoft.
So, a little backstory. I got this 360 for Christmas 2006. Ran great, loved the thing. No problems what so ever. While my friends who have had theirs at launch are on their second or third 360's, I'm loving mine.
Yesterday, I boot up MLB 2k7, and it tells me there is an update. I download the update, everything goes well. Go back to playing the baseball, and then everything goes to hell.
There are these bizarre graphical artifacts all over the screen. I escape to the dashboard, and its the same there. Rebooting fixes the problem, but it happens everytime in MLB 2k7, about 15 minutes in.
I assume its the recent update, so I clear the cache and try to backdate the updates. Works good. I play some Hitman Blood Money. No problems, back to the good Xbox 360. Then, I get the same graphical artifacts, albeit, a little differently, in Hitman.
Since this is now a 360 problem, not a MLB 2k7 problem, I turn to my unlimited research library (aka google) and start searching for problems. I quickly discover, that this problem is semi-to-less common, and its usually caused by the heatsink on the GPU overheating. Since the GPU isn't 'critical' thats why it can spazzz out and the little red ring finder doesn't trip for it.
The most common cause seems to be too much dust in the bottom air intake. So, people exchange stories of using compressed air or small vaccums to clear the dust off the heatsink. I decide to do this, but since its late, I wait for today.
I wake up this morning, decide to try it, and uh noes, I get a red ring. Lower right quadrant. E74 error, which is...
A) Bad AV Cables (not true, I tried them with my two sets of cables. Same Problem)
B) Scaler Chip Error
C) GPU Error
Considering I don't want to void my warranty by opening up my Xbox 360 to try to install some cheap Chinese GPU or Scaler Chip, I'm forced to try to call Microsoft.
Its June 30th, 2007. Has of now, my Xbox 360 is dead, with the red rings. I am going to contact Microsoft later today, and hopefully they'll give me a free-shipping-free-repair deal, since mine is under warranty, and I didn't put mayo in the DVD drive or anything.
(Thats my little journal thing that will hopefully make up the majority of the Xbox is Dead things. Notice how I bloded the text, right? Nice, I know.)
Hmmm, K-Fed, former backup singer/dancer and wife to the skinhead Britney Spears has found a new job. Putting the smack down on Larry and Sergey. K-Fed's new 'site' Searching With Kevin is a new search engine. Every time you search, you have a chance of winning a prize, mostly K-Fed-branded clothing, but, there is the grand prize of getting one of 10 tickets to 'K-Fed's birthday party.'
He doesn't have that secret software engineering degree from MIT, the site is basically a portal for a 'real' search engine, Prodege. Prodege, on their site, claims to "PRODÉGÉ is the first socially-conscious search engine." Huh?
Apparently, having a Prodege branded-portal gets you some kind of revenue. So "Searching with Kevin" is some kind of way to make money for our hero, K-Fed. Although I'm not totally informed on the topic, Prodege is the sleazy used-car lot of the Web 2.0 companies.
Curiously enough, going to the Prodege Home Page, shows below the search bar, "Enhanced by Yahoo! Search". They're not even smart enough to make their own search engine. Lets bring this all together, Prodege is some sort of a Web 2.0 company where you pay them money to make you money from their search engine, which appears to be Yahoo's search engine, and Mr. Kevin Spears apparently is doing this, via his 'hot' new web property, Searching with Kevin.
I just can't wait until the Searching with Kevin IPO.
In case you haven't heard, some time back, our Congress passed a bill making Daylight Savings Time a few weeks earlier. Of course, in the tech world, everybody LOSES THEIR MIND because everything seems to automatically update for DST. There is a patch for Windows XP, which, isn't a big deal, it only fixes the clock. I could do that myself.
However, the reason I needed to go to Microsoft for their patch is my copy of Office 2007. I used Office 2007 religiously. I use Outlook, not for the shotty e-mail app, but instead, the calender. (I use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, if Outlook's calender saved all appointments in a single format, it would be possible to import them to a open-source application, but there isn't, so I'm stuck).
Outlook supposedly will be DEVASTATED when this new DST hits. Apparently, it is so screwy, that it will shift all appointments in some kind of odd fashion.
So, I go to Microsoft.com. Click the link about daylight savings day. Pick my OS. It tells me to download an installer, then continue. (Even though I patch my Service Pack 2 machine every patch tuesday, its got an installer for me).
I start the installer. The Firefox Download Manager says it'll take 10 minutes (I have a 1.5 Mb/s connection). I assume its a big file. I do other "important" stuff, and come back, still only at 6%. I look at the file size, its ONLY 500 KILOBITES!
So, I suppose, that every single other Windows XP Home SP2 user is also updating their machine for DST right now, so I'll have to wait for this tiny 500kb file. Hmmm, stupid DST.
Once again, I changed the name of my blog. The San Francisco reference always made me uneasy, espcially after seeing my blog linked to from the QT3 forums, and the website voice360, which I mentioned a few posts ago.
I changed it to Tech Enough, which makes no sense, but has sort of a "unsaid cool" thing going for it, and doesn't sound messed up like my San Francisco reference.
This entry will be very, very meta.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry discussing a forum where (and I said) "a majority of developers, publishers, and journalists go to discuss the latest in video games."
I wrote the entry, simply because I had nothing to blog about recently, and I thought my friends would be impressed with my "l33t" skills in finding this "secret" message board. However, the LAST thing I ever expected happened. The people on these forums, found my message board.
Gary Whitta, the columnist who led me to the forums, was the one who posted my blog entry to the thread. It expanded to a five-page thread, where they made fun of me (I'm not offended, some of it was pretty funny), and ripped apart my impressions of the board.
After talking with one of my friends, I decided, that I needed to get on my board and reply to their comments and reveal myself to them. The message board has a system where you have to e-mail the admin and he has to approve your membership in order to post. I registered, and I'm currently waiting (However, I don't think he has plans to approve me).
Oh, the humanity.
A funny little website. Xbox Live, the online service that allows you to game online with your Xbox 360, keeps and displays a pretty wide arrange of information about the player and their gaming habits.
A website, 360voice.com, has taken all that info, and done something pretty funny. It puts out a "blog" for your Xbox 360. The 360 updates its blog every day, and keeps the readers informed about the games your playing, and your gamer points.
For example, one day when I didn't log on, my Xbox 360 posted to its blog, "I was a sad Xbox 360 yesterday... UberKevin never showed up to game. That makes 6 days!"
Its a pretty funny site. Points for originality. Here is mine if you want to check it out. UberKevin's Xbox 360 can blog
PC Magazine has been a solid source of information since 1985, a good four years before I was even born. I've been a subscription holder for PC "Mag" for about 4 months, and a casual newsstand buyer for about a year before that. I'm noticing a startling trend.
In the February 13th issue, columnist Michael Miller announced that that issue's column would be his last, but he would still hold a 'columnist's blog' on the PC Mag site? The issue I got today, PC Mag's former editor-in-chief, Bill Machrone announced in his column that he also, was stepping now. However, he wasn't going to be given a blog and a link to it from the PC Mag columnist page, instead, all we know is that all his back-columns are going to be archived on PC Mag.com.
In Machrone's final column, he mentions the growing upset between internet tech media and print media. He's not alone. Ziff Davis, PC Mag's parent company, is attempting to sell the Game Group, which consists of two gaming magazines (Electronic Gaming Monthy and Games for Windows) and a "mega" website 1UP.com.
According to another blogger, 1UP.com is the crown jewel of the game group, with several hundred game-junkie teenagers who go there every day, and worship their editors with an almost cult-like following (which is only helped by 1UP's collection of weekly podcast and video podcasts, which, if intentional or not, promote the game journalists has hip, trendy, superstars).
However, the two print magazines, according to the blogger, are what is holding up MTV or a TelCo from grabbing up this lucrative "MySpace-meets-Gamespot" website. With PC Mag cutting down on its time-honored columnists, and ZD's game group being held down by two print magazines, is print media dead?
Don't forget, a few months ago I got all hot and bothered over 1UP's sale of the Official Playstation Magazine. It now appears, that ZD may have canceled that magazine to make the sale more lucrative to a potential buyer.
Is print media dead? Well, I don't think so. I enjoy reading magazines, and I currently get Ziff-Davis' Electronic Gaming Monthy and Future Publishing's PC Gamer, in addition to ZD's PC Mag. However, I appear to be in a majority.
Technology and gaming magazines are in a hard spot, because their target audience, is, quiet frankly, almost all high-end technology power users who spend most of their time on the internet. Why wait a month for a magazine to have old news when blogs, podcasts, and AJAX-powered headline RSS feeds can give you up to the minute information?
A few months back on an "EGM Live" podcast (on the 1UP Radio Network, a lovely name), Electronic Gaming Month's Dan "Shoe" Hsu said that he wanted to make his magazine's content more high-end. Maybe they'll have an exclusive interview with a rare Japanese video game developer, or have a special early review that even beats the internet.
However, Hsu was very honest, and admitted that the general stuff, like gaming news and most reviews, will be beat to consumers by the internet.
Hsu's not the only one that recognizes the advent of the internet age. PC Mag has almost ALL of its material that is in the magazine on its website, PCMag.com, even the highly-ancipated John C. Dvorak columns. And unlike the New York Times, the articles are printed in the whole, without the need to enter a subscription number, or register for their online service.
The only problem with PC Mag's strategy, is that, the information doesn't come up until the issue is published. So, its still a month-hold. The only thing worse than a magazine with old info, is a website with old info. Compared to CNET.com, PCMag.com might has well be from the stone ages.
I, personally, hope, this isn't the end of print media. No 24" LCD monitor or tablet PC can replicate the feel of that paper in your fingers. However, I think the battle is over. I am the only one of my gamer/tech junkie friends who pays for a tech or gaming magazine. The others wait for the info to hit the net.
In the case of exclusive interviews, my friends replied, "I'll just get the .pdf through BitTorrent."
This is kind of a little secret in the video game industry, but there is a message board where a majority of developers, publishers, and journalists go to discuss the latest in video games, and, a message board prerequisite, whatever crosses their mind.
The message board has rarely been mentioned in the "open", but, I've been following the clues for a long time. Most of them came from PC Gamer's Gary Whitta, leaving clues in his columns, and just this past week, I finally discovered this forum.
The admin of the forum says in his rules post, "Finally, although we welcome everyone, this is a forum composed largely of people in the industry: press, publishers, developers, and PR folks, many of whom openly identify themselves as such."
Holy crap! Being a young man who hopes to work one day in the technology (maybe video games) industry, this seems like an almost mythical place. I mean, some of the biggest names in the gaming industry openly frolic in the posts, spouting their personal e-mail and their Xbox Live gamer tag everywhere. Some, even act like little kids and annoy the others with their poor spelling and childish antics.
I mean, I was browsing and thread, and I realized that one of the posts was written by J Allard. J *freaking* Allard, Microsoft VP, head of the Xbox and Zune projects.
Well, about half way through browsing through this little treasure island, I get hit with an idea. What if I put it on Digg.
"Secret Message Board used by Game Developers, Publishers and Journalists!" Of course, I could be overreacting when I assume it would get thousands of Diggs.
This is a moral delimma? Do I enjoy this little insider's peak into the gaming world, or do I bust it on Digg, get 15-minutes of Digg fame, and ruin the forums when everybody knows about it.
Oh boy. The problems with being a blogger.... :(
Hmmmm....
When I plug my USB keyboard into my Windows PC, it takes roughly 5-10 seconds for Windows XP to recognize the keyboard, and then boot up the drivers for it. When I plug my USB keyboard into my Xbox 360, the integrated verison of Windows CE instantly recognizes it, and I can start typing right away.
Shouldn't the fully functioning verison of Windows let me use the keyboard faster? Oh well. Has are the mysteries of life.
