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Monthly Archives: June 2007

Future Console predictions

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and never seem to get around to it so hear goes…

It’s not much of a secret that I like video games. I tend to think games are a big part of the reason I grew to like computers so much. Computers are a great tool for games, and like many other people before, I eventually became more interested in the tool than in the games that are made with the tool. It does mean that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about video games.

Overall, my preference has always been console games (with a slight bias towards Nintendo). Sure I played Doom and Myst and a variety of not so great X-Wing or Tie Fighter games, but it always goes back to consoles for me.

The only current generation console I own is a Nintendo Wii. Even though I am a little disappointed with the Zelda game on it, I love the Wii. I think most of the playing I’ve done has been either Wii Sports of with games on the Virtual console. Between the wireless controllers and the virtual console games, I have decided that I completely hate dealing with game discs.

Now, on to my prediction…

I think that the Wii will be the final Nintendo console that relies primarily on physical media for its games. Whatever the next system is called (and I can’t even begin to imagine that), something like the virtual console will be the primary form of game distribution.

I would say the odds are very high (but a little less likely) that the X-Box 1080 (the only logical name for the successor to a system where the second version was called the 360) will work the same way. But not as well since it will be Microsoft in charge.

As for Sony, it is pretty safe to say they will not go that way for a long time. They’ve already gone too far down a different (and not so interesting or profitable) road to change course by the next console generation. Maybe for the PS5 (although by that point movies usually stop having numbers, so maybe the “Live Free, or Play Station”).

Bounced spam

It seems like all I’m doing today is deleting email. I’ve received hundreds (around 100 an hour) of bounced, rejected, or similar emails. Looks like an email address at one of my domains is being used as the From address in some spam. I understand when mail servers send replies for “no such address”, but it just seems unnecessary to bounce things that are flagged as spam. Everyone knows spammers use forged addresses. So these bounces don’t hurt them. It just makes the problem worse. So I can’t imagine why people do it.

The worst part is since these are mostly legit error messages from servers (most of which are phrased in the first person which I didn’t think was okay for computers to use) I can’t feed them to spamassassin so it can take care of them for me. I guess I could add a rule to flag anything going to the specific address as spam since I don’t use it. If the problem doesn’t go away soon, I think I’ll do that.

Sopranos

Everyone else is writing about the ending of “The Sopranos”, and so am I. On the off chance someone reads this who watches the show but hasn’t seen the last episode, please STOP READING NOW. As a long time TiVo fan, I understand that sometime people are a bit behind on their TV shows.

I was disappointed by the ending. In a sense that wasn’t much of a surprise since I thought the second to last season was terrible, and this past season, while better than the one before it, wasn’t great. But it was still a little disappointing since the Sopranos was a really good show at one time.

There seem to be four different ways TV shows can end. Some shows just disappear, cancelled in between seasons with no chance for closure or goodbye. Some shows have a cliffhanger with the hopes that they will return next season and never do. Sometimes show try to go out with a bang. They have something major happen. This was the case with the ending for “Seinfeld” (a show pretty much everyone but me liked). They had something big and crazy happen, and everyone hated it. “Mad About You” and “King of Queens” didn’t do much better in that regard (although “King of Queens” did try to set things back to normal a bit). Finally, a show can end by trying to show that things are basically the same as they were before, and we just don’t get to look in any more. “Cheers” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” both did this and at least in the case of “Cheers”, it was the prototype of how to properly end a long running and much loved show.

For “The Sopranos”, David Chase seemed to want to have it both ways. He threw in lots of big things (killing a lot of major characters over the last few episodes), talk of serious legal trouble for Tony, and so on. But he also ended it with the family having dinner together (at a diner which seems odd since I think there may have been a restaurant that featured pretty heavily in the show). Except that wasn’t enough. No, he also had to draw the scene out, keep showing supposedly suspicious people walking in and having Meadow take forever in a terrible attempt at parallel parking (something which I completely sympathize with). I think all this was some amateurish attempt at building drama and tension (someone should think about renting some Hitchcock movies to learn a bit). The cut to black at the end just made me think my TiVo messed up recording, it certainly did not make me think that Tony died as some people did.

I also HATE Journey. Is there a worse song they could end a show with?

I guess I would have been happy if something major had happened or if nothing had happened and it looked like things just went on. But trying to have both just seemed like a cop-out. Which for a show like this is a real shame.

Carbonation?

I wrote before about the sad state of my Honey Weizen beer.

I finally decide it was time to empty and clean out the bottle so maybe we could try again. Amazingly, when I opened a bottle (which I may have shaken up a bit), lots of beer and foam came out.

Somehow, it seems to have become carbonated after I gave up on it. I will have to wait until some is cold to see if it tastes good (and the warm sip I had was not too encouraging), but this may not be the total waste I thought.

If nothing else, it may be encouraging enough to make we want to try brewing again sooner rather than later.