As is usual tradition, I picked up the turkey and headed down to San Antonio last Wednesday.  I’ve discovered the secret to lasting 6 hours is to actually kill time with podcasts.  Typically I have a random playlist going on while I drive, but I find that listening to a podcast is pretty great.  However, a little ADD creeps in if the podcast runs a bit too long and I have to fight the urge to change tracks.  After so many years of making that 6 hour drive, it’s good I can find new ways to not fall asleep and die at the wheel.  It was getting kinda bad there pre-iPod days.

Fighting the disgust of taking my whole computer to San Antonio, I finally caved and took it for WoW purposes.  I also took Rock Band as well and taking out the need to camp out for Black Friday it was a relaxing Thanksgiving.  Had a nice Thankgsiving lunch, we don’t do dinner, ran an instance, and rocked out.  Strangely, I didn’t do a lot of Rock Band, but my brother and sisters played it quite a bit.

Even though I didn’t camp out for deals, I still went to Best Buy and picked up an 8GB thumb drive and some DVDs.  The 360 wasn’t networked as usual so I couldn’t stream stuff from my PC to the 360.  By the way did you know you can use regular ethernet cables to connect a networked PC to the 360?  Additionally I gambled this would work with my computer, so I wired my laptop to my PC as a wireless card and it worked!  I guess crossover cables are a thing of the past.  Anyway, I got all these DVDs and started burning some flicks to them, but something crazy happened on the first burn which made it unplayable after 2/3rds of the movie.  It was distressing but strangely, I decided to move the movie to my thumb drive and plug it into the 360 and it worked!  So I have a useless spindle of blank DVDs now.  Ah well.

We also went to World Market to pick up some strange and exotic food.  I finally found some panettone bread.  I tried looking last year after the holidays and the stores were dry.  However, I found some among other oddities from Italy and some kind of chocolate log.  The chocolate log tasted familiar, but this odditiy from Italy was a white nougat bar.  It had a foot like aftertaste, but otherwise was good.  The panettone was TOTALLY AWESOME though after heated up a bit.  Man it’s a great sweet bread.  Giada De Laurentiis has some recipe for them which after finally having tried just the bread, can only taste great in my imagination.

The return trip was uneventful but I have noticed a horrible trend at my apartment complex.  I live on a side street on the complex and as such I always parked out on the curb.  I was the only car ever on the curb.  Everyone else parked in the lot.  The street isn’t busy at all so I’m not concerned with the safety or anything of doing such a thing.  However, last month they repaved the lots.  So people were forced out of their spots.  But guess where they’re parking now!  Yes, on the curb, and occasionally right in front of my apartment.  So I get back and there’s no spot for me.  I’m forced to park in the lot which is annoyingly far away compared to the curb.  I don’t even know where half the cars come from!!  There’s only 8 apartments facing that street yet I see all these cars on the curb now that can’t possibly be from the 8 apartments.  Ah well.

I’ve done something bad to the background of the site, as such it’s acting weird when I log in/out of the admin page. Hopefully I can get it fixed up soon.

Fixed!

From GosuGamers
I gotta say, HD quality Youtube videos are pretty awesome now.

The last video before release this week!

I grabbed the new Xbox Live Experience (XBLE) this Wednesday fairly late.  I wanted to avoid the potential problems that may crop up with billions of Xboxes try downloading at once or if there were any major bugs to avoid it until they were fixed.  Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft did a great job with distribution and the only bug I know of is some units won’t play sound when hooked up through HDMI which doesn’t concern my unit at home.  I take an HDMI cable to travel with my Xbox though so I’m not sure if it affects me when I’m at my parent’s house or at a friend’s playing Rock Band.

I have to say, I enjoyed the blades a bit more, there’s two menu options that feel completely useless and can clutter up the new menu system.  You can get rid of one, but you still have to deal with the other which is basically just XBL online video stuff.  I was greeted with the avatar creation system and made a fairly close looking guy to myself.  It felt very mii-ish but had a bit more customization.  No chance to see what the point of the avatar is yet since I don’t own any games that use them, but maybe they’ll be cool.

I installed Rock Band 2 to the hard drive.  It takes a bit.  I loaded it up and didn’t notice any phenomenal loading time difference.  I won’t say I didn’t notice any difference, it did seem a bit faster, but it won’t make the songs load up in 2 seconds or anything.  I did notice that the Xbox itself is very quiet, which is a huge plus when it used to be an annoying background noise.

Now based on this great Lifehacker article I installed TVersity onto my desktop and was able to stream all my video files except for .mkv extensions without any trouble.  I’m sure there’s a way to get those to stream but I haven’t messed with it yet, either way, I’m loving the new streaming options.  I even got some classic Star Trek up on the TV.

There’s one glaring issue with the Xbox and it’s unrelated to any new change and probably won’t affect people with new widescreen TVs.  But I have an old 4:3 HDTV.  So the Xbox setting for high def pushes it to 1080i mode which is fine, but when displaying content in 4:3 it should revert to 480p automatically like my DVD player does.  Now when watching 4:3 content, I get in in this centered little window on my TV and it’s annoying to manually switch.

Overall, the changes are kinda minimal for such a long wait for this update.  The best feature is installing to HD, but some games are hit and miss.  Halo 3 doesn’t like being installed for instance by design.  I’m dying to know how good the Netflix thing is because I kind of want to dumb regular cable for Netflix since I don’t end up watching a lot of TV anymore.  There are some things that I might really have a hard time not occasionally watching (Adult Swim/Globe Trekker/Food Network) so it’s a hard decision.

Brightening up your post-mid-week boredom I present a catchy tune:

Hurry up and come out already!

This is a rehash of something from a long time ago.  I don’t know that I have a long winding list of pet peeves, but two quickly come to mind when someone says the words like word association.  I hear the words pet peeve and think wet socks.  I hate wet socks, they can ruin a day.  Slogging around in the grueling cold dampness is a cruel fate.  I feel like days in general can’t get worse unless my socks get wet.

But that’s not really the main point of what I’m about to complain about.  No, a far more life threatening pet peeve of mine is when people drive in the left lane and decide to slow down in it, then get into the turn lane.  It occurs every day I drive.  You’d think I’d learn maybe to just stay in the middle lane if possible or come to terms with people that just love to do it.  Most of the time I can pass on the right quickly and am alright with it.  Today was the worst I’d ever seen though.  Not because they came to a near complete stop in the left lane or anything, but because when they finally decided to get over, they didn’t change lanes completely.  No, this person decided that the best course of action was to slow down rapidly in the left lane, which I like to think is for the fastest traffic, however this might now be a forgone conclusion, then stop halfway between both lanes.

My first reaction was that hey, this person is doing that thing I hate.  No problem, I’ll slow down and they’ll finally get over and I can go by.  My plan reached a meltdown when I’m still going 25-ish and now slamming on my brakes because the distance is now simply too small between us to safely stop.  At this point, I had to pull a completely reckless move and just swerve to the center lane, reckless because I never bothered to look if that lane was clear.  This is certainly a weakness of mine but is probably how many accidents happen, when contingency plans go bad.  Today, I lucked out and it was clear.  But as I pass the person it became clear how insane they were as they had decided staying between the two lanes truly was the ideal choice for their navigation plans.

Why do people continue to do this???  Where has common courtesy gone!?!?!?  It’s possible perhaps, that people get into their cars and don’t realize that the world around them has to co-exist with them.  Self contained in their bubble, everything they see is more like something on TV or something and doing whatever you want is alright because everything just moves right past you anyway.  It’s possible the moral of this story is this echoing lately that I feel like everything in life I take for granted and it’s not until something is taken away that I feel its importance.  I’d be in deep poop had I wrecked the car, so will I learn my lesson and be more defensive when I drive home today or will I be in another situation that makes me reflect on the idiocy of everyone else on the road?

For the last two years, I’ve basically given up my Thanksgiving Thursday in exchange for a long cold sidewalk outside of Best Buy.  My parent’s house was a wasteland of non-technology, but in the two years that have transpired, they’ve gone up to the HDTV lifestyle, multiple modern day computers and high speed Internet.  No longer do I feel like trips back home are on a farm.  So now I wonder, is there a point going for year 3?

www.blackfriday.info has the Best Buy ad as well as the Circuit City ad up.  I’ve gone through the BB one and noticed absolutely nothing worth spending nearly 18 hours in the cold for.  I think the last piece of digital wizardry I could use is a camera, but even that isn’t too big of a deal for me since I’m not one to take a lot of pictures anyway.  I could also stand an upgrade from my 256MB thumb drive to an 8GB one.  But I don’t need black friday deals to buy those since they continuously drop in price.  I imagine in 6 months I could get a 32GB thumb drive for these prices.

So for the first time in 3 years, I can look forward to a day of turkey and possibly a whole lot of Rock Band with my family.

When Burning Crusade came out, I skipped the preorder phenomenon and hoped and prayed that I could still get one.  I headed to Wal-Mart that night and got in a decent sized line.  I was about the 10th person in or so.  Midnight hits and they go on sale.  As I approach I ask, or maybe it was the person in front of me, about the collector’s edition.  The clerk gives us a weird look like “There’s another one of these?”  to which they proceed to go to the back.  Everyone behind us groans, they didn’t hear us, thinking we’re holding everyone up.  However, they come back with crazy amounts of collector’s editions and everyone rejoices.

This year, I’m hoping my luck will hold out and the same thing will happen.  Though I moved so the Wal-Mart from the last story is across town, I still had 2 to choose from in my vicinity.  I head to the first one and I’m about the 15th person in line.  I ask the clerk about a CE version to which the guy in front of me says they only have 6 and that they’re probably already taken.  Gee dude in front of me, you think?  So I leave and head to the second Wal-Mart around me.  I end up about 10th in this line and make the same inquiry to which this store replies they have zero.  Zero is a weird number for me to digest so I leave and consider going to the Gamestop in the parking lot.  I glaze over and notice that there’s this huge line about 20+ people long and I say forget it.

Now I’m not one to plan things without backup plans.  Oh yes I had many actually.  My first backup plan was knowing a friend of mine was going to the Wal-Mart that I got my Burning Crusade copy from and hoping that they were again going to have a boatload of them.  However, she calls and says that they in fact have zero, which even a second time is hard to digest.  So I’m aimlessly driving, but I’m near Best Buy and on the phone she says that they were having a midnight opening.  I think about how strange that is because my BB is not known for such things.  But I head out there anyway.

Getting to Best Buy the parking lot was lit up and there were a good amount of cars on the side lot.  I park in the front and notice two managerial types at the door looking anxious to lock up.  I can’t blame them, it’s about 12:20 at this time.  They greet me courteously without a drop of weariness or “Ugh, people are still coming in” kinda feeling.  I walk in and see a nice big table with all these copies of Wrath, and one with a CE box on it.

“I NEED THAT!”

“You’re in luck!” says the employee.  I asked knowing my buddy and her brother will want one if they had more.

“Oh yeah we got tons under the table.”

Ecstatic, I call them up and hurry them over.  But knowing I was the only customer and seeing as lots of employees were looking very tired, I just bought 3 copies and left.  I had a pleasant conversation with the cashier who plays Alliance even though her co-employee beside her plays horde.  She gave me her server and character name though it’s impossible for me to move servers but I was friendly.

So I’m 5 for 5 on collector’s editions spanning from Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and the 3 incarnations of WoW.  I had to call in my backup plans and tell them I had lucked out.  I didn’t get it installed completely until around 2:30AM so I only had time to head to Borean Tundra and log out.  This felt more hectic and I’m hoping I have a bit less stressful time picking up a Starcraft 2 CE for whenever they decide to come out.