Well, I've had a Wii for a while now and I've never seen anyone show up on the Wii Parade. I thought it was automatic. Guess not. Anyway, if you want to chat with my on the Wii, my Wii number is:
4981 4304 5607 7915
Yesterday, I picked up a copy of Wii Play. The reason I bought it was because it cost $49 but came with a Wii Remote in the box. This $49 cost is basically the cost of the Wii Remote itself. I figured that I would be getting a sequel to the Wii Sports game that comes with the Wii, but hopefully a more advanced sequel. Plus I would be getting a 'free' Wii Remote in the process. It turns out rather than being a more advanced version of Wii Sports, that it is really more of the same. In other words, its a bunch of very simple little games that are more designed to teach you how to use the Wii Remote than to be any advanced kind of game. Oddly enough, even though these games are very simple, they are strangely fun to play. The game comes with the following little games:
Target Practice
This is a game designed to train you in using the remote to shoot things. It's a game where you see a grass field. Above this field move various targets, clay 'pigeons' and other things. The purpose it to use your remote as a shotgun to shoot the targets. Some move and some don't. The ones that don't move appear and disappear quickly on the screen so you have to be fast. At one point, you even see a bunch of little people running around in the grass. These little people are multiple copies of your Mii character. They run around in the grass as UFOs fly overhead and try to abduct them. You have to shoot down the UFOs before they can abduct your people. It's all done in a very cartoonish, but entertaining way.
Bubbles
On this game, you see various bubbles dropping down from the top of the screen. Inside the bubble is an outline of your Mii character in various poses. The purpose of the game is to twist the remote so your onscreen Mii lines up with profile in the bubble. Then you click on the bubble with your Mii to 'pop' the bubble. As the levels advance, the rotated positions of the Miis get more varied and the pose of the Mii changes inside the bubble. You have to not only rotate your Mii, but rapidly switch his pose to match the one in the bubble. It gets hard after a while.
Laser Hockey
This is a game similar to playing a game of air hockey. You have two pucks and the object is to bat the ball into the opponents goal. The ball bounces off the walls and off of your puck as you move around, so you have to learn to aim with the remote better to play this one.
Billiards
This is a game where you have a billiards table with 9 balls on it and you have to hit the cue ball to knock the balls into the pockets in order. It teaches you to do some more 3D moves with the remote. For this one, you pull the remote back to pull the cue back, and then thrust it forward to move the cue forward, hitting the cue ball. The cue ball even has the face of your Mii on it...
Mii Matching
This game shows a group of different Mii characters on the screen and you have to find the two that match. What makes this game more difficult is that their faces match, but their clothes don't.
Table Tennis
This game is a version of table tennis (i.e. 'Ping Pong'). You just have to move your remote around to move your paddle so it hits the ball. The object of the game is to see how many times you can hit the ball back to the other side without missing it. As your play, the ball starts to move faster and bounce around the table, so it gets harder...
Tank Battle
This game is a game where you have a tank and the object is to use your tank to shoot the other tanks on the board before they shoot you. There are various obstacles on the board you can use to hide behind. You can also bounce your bullets off of obstacles, allowing you to hit the tank without getting hit yourself. You can also drop mines for the other tanks.
Cow Racing
This is a game where it shows your Mii riding on the back of a cow. The object is to 'race' your cow down a road, knocking over scarecrows and jumping over hurdles. You play this one with the remote held sideways (left to right). You turn the remote to the left or right to steer the cow and you twist it forward or back to speed up or slow down. You lift the remote up rapidly to jump the hurdles.
On a side note, this was my first time trying to connect a second remote to the Wii. One question I had was how to tell which Wii remote was remote 1 and which was remote 2. They are both identical. It turns out that the way this works is once you synchronize the remote as remote 1 or 2, there is a line of 4 lights along the bottom of the remote. For remote 1, the first light is lit, and for remote 2, the second light is lit. This is a nice way to differentiate the two.
Well, it looks like I can access my blog from my Wii. I am typing this from the Wii while connected wirelessly through my new Apple Airport Extreme. The Internet is very fast on the Extreme. Typing sucks on it though. The Wii has a nice spellchecker that makes it easier though.
Ok, so last night I came to one of those 'duh!' realizations - keeping a TODO list is a huge help in getting stuff done, especially if you are an absent-minded procrastinator like me. I'd been scribbling down a list of things to do for the last few days. Normally I don't do this. This means nothing gets done because if it's not there on paper reminding me, I'll forget to do it. This time, I kept a list so I got a lot done.
First, I cleaned the bathroom. It was badly in need of cleaning. Is it a perfect job cleaning? No, but then I'm not THAT picky! That's one item off the list. So since I'm already in the bathroom, I decided to tackle the next item on my list.
The next item on my list was to remove the mirror from the wall. I'm in the process of starting the remodel of my 2nd bathroom and I'm going to be replacing the mirror, so the old one had to go. It was a surprisingly easy job to do. This mirror came off a lot easier than the one in the other bathroom. I suspect the glue wasn't holding it very well at all. This thing could have almost come off on it's own. With the help of a little prying with the machete, it popped right off. Unfortunately it didn't come off as cleanly as the other mirror. The other mirror came off in one solid piece. This one actually broke into several large, sharp shards of glass as I pulled it off. Thankfully it didn't completely shatter, so I didn't have glass everywhere. Just a couple of large pieces to move. After carefully carying those large, sharp pieces of glass out into the garage, and doing a little vaccuming to pick up the small pieces of glass, that was task number two done. Of course now that I don't have a mirror in the bathroom, it makes it a lot harder to get ready in the morning. I had to use the mirror in the other bathroom this morning... I may have to use that other bathroom from now on, while the remodel is being done. I got so much done last night I even considered ripping out the vanity itself, but sanity prevailed and I decided to wait until this weekend.
The next task on the list was to pay the bills. I sat down at the trusty Mac, loaded up the browser and in 5 minutes flat, had those paid. You gotta love online billpay. I even wrote a check for $2000 as another payment towards my car. I've been on a serious tear lately paying off my car as fast as I can. I bought the thing in March 2005 - a bit under 2 years ago. In the last 6 months, I've payed about $8-10 thousand dollars towards that car! I'm trying my damnedest to pay it off within the next couple months. With that $2000 payment, I only have $4500 left to pay. I figure I can knock that off within the next couple of months... I'd hoped to have it payed off by the end of March (which would have made it 2 years flat to pay off the car), but I may not make it... It might stretch another month or so before I get it finished. You'll be hearing me scream for joy on this blog, when I manage to get that thing paid off.
Finally, after all that work, it was only 9:30PM, so I still had a couple of other hours to kill before my 11PM bedtime. I ended up sitting down and watching the animated movie 'Open Season'. It was an OK movie. Nothing spectacular. I'm really getting tired of the CGI animated forest animal movies...
You may not think that is a lot of stuff to get done in a night, but for me, that's a lot. My evenings usually consist of watching TV or messing around on the computer. I got a hell of a lot more done last night than I usually do.
Every now and then, while searching my server logs, I find things that are just downright bizarre. Recently I was looking through the User Agents List. This is a list of what browsers and/or search engines that have hit my site. By far the strangest was:
Morfeus Fucking Scanner
Anyone have any clue what this is???
I've had a wireless network in my home for several years now. Even though I have the network, I've rarely used it. Both of my computers are in the same room as the router and they are all connected directly to the router with Ethernet cables. I originally got the wireless router so I could use my old laptop from the living room. Since at the time, my laptop was running Linux, that whole wireless network thing never really worked out. For the longest time, my home wireless network was basically useless. Something has happened recently that has made me change that outlook.
That something was the Nintendo DS and later the Nintendo Wii. Both devices include built in wireless networking. It's an amazing thought to be sitting there holding your little handheld video game machine and be able to easily (and for free!) play video games against anyone in the world! It really opens up huge new possibilities in what you can do with a video game device. On top of that, the Wii not only updates itself wirelessly over the network, it comes with a very capable web browser that turns your TV into a fairly decent web browsing machine. You can even send and receive emails from the Wii. And all this functionality is free!
For years I've been toying with the idea of wiring my entire home for Ethernet. I never liked the fact that wireless networks were slow and relatively insecure. Now, I find myself seriously considering upgrading to the Apple Airport Extreme, which runs a MUCH faster, much more secure wireless network and just using wireless throughout my home. I'm beginning to think that the whole wiring the house for Ethernet idea is not needed anymore... I procrastinated long enough that the problem solved itself!
The more I think about all the electronic devices in my house having wireless network connectivity, the more I like it! I want to add wireless to my DirecTV DVR now as well as my DirecTV Tivo... If both of those things could update themselves wirelessly over the Internet, rather than dialing out on built in modems, that would not only not tie up my phone line at times, it would make the updates significantly faster. I'm going to have to investigate if this can be done...
Yesterday, I bought a Wii! It took standing in line for an hour outside of Best Buy, but I got one. The Wii is Nintendo's new video game machine. I have to say that while the graphics are nowhere near as good as a PS3 or XBox 360, it is a lot of fun. It does a lot of interesting stuff.
Wireless networking
The Wii has built in wireless networking. I was easily able to get it connected to my home network and wirelessly update itself. The Nintendo DS also has wireless networking. I really like how Nintendo seems to be building in wireless networking into all their game machines these days. On top of that, they DON'T CHARGE to play games over the wireless connection. Granted, I don't know of any Wii games that play directly over the network, but I'm sure it's possible.
Browse the web
The Wii uses a version of the Opera web browser to allow you to browse the web using only the wireles s'wii-mote' remote. It actually works a lot better than I expected. Since TVs run at much lower resolutions than a computer, I expected the web pages to look horrible, since the web browser would have to try to render it at such a low resolution. It turns out that the way it works is that it shows the entire web site on screen, seemingly at a PC resolution but kind of shrunk down in size (sort of a 'photo-reduced' image of the site.) Then you can use the remote to scroll around the page and magnify whatever sections you want.
View Photos
The Wii includes a Secure Digital memory card slot that you can use for various things including viewing photos from a digital camera. It even does some nice little slideshows of the photos
.Play MP3s
I haven't tried this yet, but supposedly it can play MP3s off of the Secure Digital card as well.
Buy older games online
I also haven't tried this yet. They have a bunch of old Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64 etc games available that you can buy and play on it.
It comes with a game
Most video game machines are sold as the machine only. They don't come with any games. The Wii comes with a game called 'Wii Sports'. It's a little game that lets you play Baseball, Tennis, Golf, Bowling, and Boxing using the wireless, motion sensitive remote. Granted the graphics on the game are very simple, but they are still fun little games to play and it's nice that it gives you something you can actually play with right out of the box.
I bought one game along with it - Marvel's Ultimate Alliance. (I'm a sucker for superhero video games). I've been playing this game for a while and it is a lot of fun. I'm still trying to get used to the motion controls though... It's very different from what I'm used to playing a game.
All in all, I gotta say, I like this little thing! It's a lot of fun!
A few days ago, I realized that this year is my 20th high school graduation anniversary! It's amazing how fast those 20 years went by. A lot has changed in my life in those 20 years. I own my own car, I own my own home, I make a lot more money, and my health is considerably better. All in all, things have gone pretty well these last 20 years.
Today is my brother Bob's birthday. I won't mention his age. :)
I never did understand the philosophy of spamming. Spam emails are often filled with nonsense text added in to throw off spam filters. They also tend to use images lately to prevent filtering based on text content. I've never understood how anyone could be expected to take these nonsensical emails seriously and actually buy stuff.
In the spammers continuing quest to attract your attention and make you actually read their pathetic sales pitches, they often try to write subject lines designed to get your attention. Usually these are generic subject lines like 'Hi!', or stuff like that. Anything to make you think it's not an ad, but some friend trying to contact you. Personally, if the sender's name is unknown to me, I'll just delete these without reading. I've noticed something new in their bag of tricks over the last few days.
Lately, I've been getting spam emails where the subject line is the same as the subject line of a recent news story. These include such things as celebrity news, tech news etc. I imagine the idea is to make you think a friend is emailing you an interesting news story you should read. But then, when you read the email, only the subject line is the 'news story'. The rest of the email is an ad. It's getting to the point that I don't trust my email at all. If someone unknown contacts me, it's likely that email will get deleted by me as spam, even if it's not.
Spam is rapidly making email completely useless.