Wii First Impressions

Another first for our family, the kids got a Wii, most generously, from Emily's brothers and sisters-in-law, collectively.   Let me first say, WOW.   Very impressive.   It was a little touchy at first, trying the get the hang of the controller movement, but it's not too hard to get the hang of it.  Then I started to play Table Tennis on Resort Sports, which came with the unit.   I've played a lot of ping pong in my day, actually getting quite good (again, back in the day), so I know how to spin the ball and slam it and such.   This game actually responded to all of the different kinds of returns, sensing my wrist movements and position.   Very cool stuff.

Setup
Hookup was easy enough, although I was out of regular analog video inputs on the TV, so I purchased component cables from Best Buy.   I got the Rocketfish component cables, they were $10 less than Nintendo brand ones, but they seem to work just fine.  Good video quality for non-HD.   I also hooked it up to the internet wirelessly, though the only tangible benefit I've seen so far is that I can get the current weather report.   That was a slight challenge, but it was more due to my firewall configuration since the Wii doesn't seem to support WPA2 Personal / TKIP encryption, so I had to change my encryption to handle both TKIP and AES (using Tomato firmware, it was just a setting to change).

Gameplay
As I said earlier, it was a little touchy, but you get used to it.   I'm going to have to spend more time with it to really get a good handle on it, so I'm not the best person to review it yet.   I hope to get more games soon, like Tiger Woods '11 and Madden '11, and then I'll post again about my findings.   I guess there are worse ways to have to spend time.   We'll see if the kids let me get enough time in.   So far, it's a hit with the 9 year old, and even my 3 year old seems to like the Cars Race O Rama game.

More to come...

My Original Moto Droid

I've had my Motorola Droid for a year and change now, and with the announcement that the iPhone is coming to Verizon, I'm sure there will be defectors, but I will not be one of them.   I'm keeping my Droid as long as it keeps turning on, until something much better comes out that uses Android.   I could never bring myself to give up the turn by turn navigation that Google Navigation provides.   Who the heck needs a GPS device when you've got an Android phone?

I've had my phone rooted (hacked for my non-technical readers) for months now, which gives me the ability to do all sorts of fun things on it, like use a non-standard system (of which I use CyanogenMod), wifi-tethering, which allows me to use the internet wherever I want on my laptop, through my phone, and overclocking the processor, which lets the phone run faster than Verizon wants it to run.   Gotta love modern technology, open source software, and lots of motivated developers.

My First Blog Post

It only took me years to do this.   I'm probably the last software engineer on the planet to actually start writing a blog.   I'm going to try to do this at least once a day, or every other day, as time allows.   I'll cover everything that is important to me, which is actually a pretty wide range of topics, including my family, politics, sports, space, home improvement, et. al.   Should be interesting to see how many people I can actually tick off when writing about my political leanings, so I'll try to minimize my ramblings on that particular topic.   Hope you all enjoy, if anyone actually ends up here.    We'll see.