September 30th

I feel like I'm cheating on a girlfriend.

I might end up using Windows XP more on my Macbook than OS X soon, simply because of the sheer ease of setting up a media server under that operating system. I feel dirty, but I'm really considering switching back full-time. It's terrible, but I'm rediscovering why I was able to use XP for years without a complaint: Just how goddamn easy it is to find things for it.

In all of my years of computer usage, I've only found a handful of programs that have come back after a search as "Mac OS X Only", and those were usually easily replaceable by other programs, open source or otherwise. Now, after two days of pretty much fruitless searching for an easy way to set up an OS X media server, I've caved. I'm back to XP and it's working wonderfully. If all goes as planned, as soon as my music loads up in Windows Media Player 11 (which looks functionally so much like iTunes it's off-putting) then we should be off to the races. --Oop, there goes a WMP bug. Only added up to "N" of my library. Way to shoot me back to reality, Microsoft.

*Sigh*

Alright, there it goes. Although most of my formatting options have remained intact, alot of deleted tracks seem to be showing up. That's gonna be quite a bit of cleaning that I've got ahead of me. It doesn't seem to want to tell me how many files it has. It said "found 9000-some odd, but only added 7000". That doesn't add up. I can't tell what it's not adding, but most of it seems to be there.

Now to test out that media server...

Well, I'll end the play-by-play here. This is going to be a huge pain to do all over agian, particularly if it needs to be boot-camped one more time for more space. Bleh.

Whatev.

A Fresh Dust-Collector for the Shelf

I've done it. The proverbial holy grail of home console gaming: I have obtained all three major consoles. It's been relatively short road, starting last October with my Wii, continuing over the summer with my fiance's PS3, and concluding now with my birthday/Christmas present: The XBOX 360. It's a beautiful looking machine, but I must say that the lack of Wi-Fi connectivity is really hurting the overall experience. I'd like to take this baby online, I just don't have the ethernet to do it. Apparently Microsoft offers a Wi-Fi adapter, which I'll have to pick up sooner rather than later, but it's a small inconvenience overall. We've already obtained a small but satisfying library of games, consisting of Gears of War, Tales of Vesperia, Infinite Undiscovery, and Phantasy Star Universe. It's provided more than a good amount of gaming since picking it up yesterday afternoon, and it looks and sounds fantastic in 1080p and Dolby surround.

...Interestingly enough, however, it hasn't been me doing the majority of the playing. My fiance has clocked a good number of hours into Tales of Vesperia, but the majority of my gaming time has been going to the fantastic DS game, Lock's Quest. The DS has been time and time again proving to me that it really is the most satisfying console experience available--that's a different blog post for a different time, however. All told, I highly recommend 5th Cell's DS offering. If you're into strategy games at all be sure to give it a look.

I'll probably post a hands-off review of Vesperia in the coming days. I'm trying to get this site back up and running again, after being in a 2-month rut.



Thanks for reading,
-Derek