The ScooterBlog

So let me pose you a question … you can buy 100 DVD’s for about $30, or you can buy a 500 GB hard drive for about $60 to $65 … which one would you pick? In my mind, the decision is quickly changing over to using the hard drive.

The answer is simple … it comes from both a sense of space and time. I’ve always been an optical media addict, for a good 10 years now, and that means saving anything I find to a CD, or DVD, or something that’s fairly static. However, this doesn’t come without its own cost … time. Even at 16x speeds, it takes five minutes to burn a full DVD and maybe another five minutes to get that disc ready and organize stuff.  So, six discs an hour … if you value your time at minimum wage, that’s $1 a disc!

So after about 30-50 discs, your possible return on investment over having a drive that holds 100 DVD’s worth of stuff and is dynamic and not “stuck” in place suddenly sounds plausibly good.  You would also lose other possible negatives of disc media, like space lost when you can’t fill a disc, or sometimes questionable compatibility from drive to drive.

So, these now suddenly cheap hard drives, under 15 cents a GB, and quickly approaching a dime … are they the answer to everything? There is an argument to say no too. Optical media does have a nice convenience factor, and will always have a use when sharing media with friends, and when you need some space quick, a 4.7 GB disk beats waiting for a huge hard drive to show up. No USB ports needed, no extra cabling to haul with you. Organizing will also cost time here, so it would be unrealistic to think that the preparation time you assume would be saved with every disc is fully collected back.

But with all that in mind, I can see myself picking up one of these drives soon and testing out the theory of whether I do save the kind of time I think I could with going with hard drives. External drives are down to $70 from places like eCost.com (and even $90 from local sources), internal drives are sometimes cheaper than that from Geeks.com and Newegg.com … and if it seems unrealiztic to think I’d want to carry a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure on the road with me (which is a fair argument), dynamic flash media and portable hard drives are dramatically less than what they were (8GB Flash Drives for $25, 120GB portable drives for $60), so data portability is not a huge thing, and that doesn’t even include the cloud storage world!

So, what do you think? Are you compelled to give up on optical and go with hard drives more and more?

This post will be simple … I was listening to Music Choice, one of those nice digital cable (or any premium cable anymore) perks, and they played Britney Spears’ first single, “Hit Me Baby One More Time”. The song was perfectly fine and all, and I’m not ashamed to say I liked her first album. Of course, I was also 18 at the time! We also didn’t know that every other album would sound exactly the same at that point.

But I digress. The point of the quick post is simply to say that the date of the song was … 1998! I need not say any more than to just wonder out loug along with you, how 10 years can change a whole heck of a lot.

Sometimes, you struggle with telling friends why you love wrestling. There are certainly arguments against it … it’s fake (which it’s not, it’s scripted), the athletes are steroid enhanced animals (which is everything anymore), and it’s nothing more than a soap opera. Sometimes, you read the negatives and you do wonder.

But then you have a weekend like this past one and you’re reminded exactly why you love it, and it goes much farther than just whether you like or hate John Cena (he is still the man by the way). The tribute paid to Ric Flair, both with his last match, his Hall Of Fame Induction and his farewell on Monday Night RAW where many of his old competitors met him at the ring as well as the entire company’s roster was one of the most touching moments I have seen in a long time. A wonderful tribute not just for Ric as a wrestler but as a man who has come full circle in his life in the ring, and has proven to be a role model and a leader even in the later stages of his career, and even at nearly sixty years old, a treat to watch in the ring.

Wrestling isn’t exactly the kind of sport that brings you to tears. It can bring you great excitement rooting on the wrestler you like (or the bad guy you want to get over), anger at the storyline not going your way, but not generally the joy that brings tears, but you couldn’t help but feel as strongly as everyone in the ring, everyone in the arena, heck, everyone in the stadium at Wrestlemania, at the appreciation, the love for someone who meant so much to their passion and business. Watching guys who are legends of the current day show just how appreciative they are of the legends of the past AND current was unbelievably cool. My wife was even welled up watching it, how could you not be?!

I’m admittedly a younger fan in terms of Ric Flair. I watched WWE far more than I did WCW back in the 90’s when I cared, and only saw Ric weekly in the days of Evolution. His exuberance for his work, the fun you could tell he had when he was out there was wonderful, and this is me watching him at the end of the career! Even in those last few years, he made both a good heel and face, and rare is the wrestler in any era who does both well.

I’m sure I will be doing more wrestling posting in the near future, because I have the event that I’ve watched that has rekindled the interest for me even more, and trust me, I will miss seeing Ric in the ring, and will be glad every time I hear a “Woooooo!” from the crowd.

So I figured out that whole Mario Superstar Baseball problem … user error! If you ever look at a Gamecube and then a Wii in horizontal form, you will notice that the direction of the ports is reversed … left to right on the Gamecube, right to left on the Wii.

So, story solved, my Wii is in working order, and all is well with the world. Well, for now!

So as the first person in the fast outspace of the world to write this (because I’ve checked), I want some help in detecting if I am smoking something, or if this is a real problem.

I went to play Mario Superstar Baseball the other day in my Nintendo Wii. I’ve played a couple of games with the Wii’s GameCube compatibility before without issues, I thought this would go just as well. I was wrong.

The game loaded okay, and asked if I wanted to use Progressive Mode (480P). When I went to say YES with the Wavebird controller, no feedback. The Wavebird receiver was chirping, so I knew the signal made it to there, but no response from the game at all. It continued to load, and the intro played great. But no matter what I did, no controller input was accepted.

I tried a second Wavebird, thinking it was the controller, didn’t help. I even went to a wired controller, which did not work either! So now, extremely worried, I put in Mario Power Tennis, which I had played the day before … it worked fine. Not a problem at all.

So I am wondering, is this a problem for anyone else or am I losing my mind? Help me figure this out! PLEASE!

In a recent case of the pot calling the kettle black, Kotaku wrote that Next-Gen editor Colin Campbell (doesn’t he dole out suspensions in the NHL?!) wrote that used game sales are "parasitic" and cost the industry a billion dollars. This is my attempt to write that I am proud of my small but important contribution to this effort. Some of us are just not blessed, either by choice or by budget. Here’s the reason list:

• I would much rather support an independent retailer than I would a box chain. My $10 or $15 of profit is better spent for my needs supporting local economy than it is supporting a multi billion dollar company. Not to mention, if I’m buying the game used, someone somewhere in the line of the process has gotten paid, so the whole guilting process does nothing for me.
• Game Developers are finding new ways to make a buck directly, and I don’t mind them. With content going digital, most downloadable content and all of these mini Arcade style games can only be bought new, and that’s money in the pocket of developers. There are few things I appreciate more than continuing support for games and I’ve been faithful in getting updates to many games (Gears of War, Forza 2, Halo 3 are examples) and will continue to do so.
• The quoted numbers of $1 Billion are no different than their attempts to quote a number due to piracy. It’s a number thrown out there that would seem to be nearly impossible to substantiate or prove whether those people would buy new games should the opportunity present itself, which I would venture to say many would not.

Stores that I have worked for and patronized would not even exist if it wasn’t for the presence of used games, and I am willing to bet that franchises would never hit cult status if it wasn’t for the used game scene. It helps the industry and gamers as a whole, bashing it is nothing more than an unwanted cash grab.

So I have discovered a minor, but certainly annoying detail of having a High Definition LCD TV … they sometimes don’t play nice with the older non-HDTV equipment. It’s like you can only live in one of the worlds at the same time!

Basically, here’s the scoop … my wonderful, but yet very affordable $379 32-Inch HDTV isn’t so good at upscaling non-HDTV (480i and lower) content easily, so it lags. On my PS2, it lags by about a tenth of a second. This is not much grant you, but enough to mess with your mind when you try and play a game based solely on timing … like Hot Shots Golf or Guitar Hero.

The good news? It appears like the only system this will negatively affect is the PS2. Dreamcast can be High-Def (VGA Cable), the new systems of course are always High-Def to some degree or another, and even XBox games were pretty much required to be 480p with very very few exceptions (just another reason why the XBox was the Dreamcast 2). And heck, the PS3 can backwards play real PS2 games, so the affects are not daunting.

Older systems than that? Well, that’s why they have emulators (and me getting cables to allow me to play with the REAL controllers!), and those can be on the big screen with laptops and VGA and HDMI cables.

Oh .. and that rogue PS2? I’m going to test it tonight with my rear projection HDTV, I assume it will do much better.

So I finally caved … of course, it helps to sell a ton of stuff on eBay that you’ll never use again to get you to the point of being able to say that you caved. I now own a 60 GB PS3, and it’s the only model I would be willing to touch. The arguments for why have been laid out before, but since I’m here, I’ll do it again.

• Sony has made it clear now … it doesn’t view backwards compatibility as important anymore, but I do! Enough so at least that I was willing to pay $50 more ($450, Game Rush, Northern Kentucky) to get the 60 GB system instead of the 40 GB variety. That seemed like a fair upcharge for the functionality, as well as the extra hard drive space, which will be handy when Linux gets installed on there … which it will!
• I wanted the memory card slots and extra USB ports. These are not important likely in the grand scheme of things, but if I have tons of flash media scattered about, I want the ability to use them without thinking about it (a.k.a. card reader, which would be lost).
• I didn’t mind having first generation equipment with the PS3. These machines have proven to be extremely reliable so far with low return rates, so having the first generation doesn’t worry me in any way.

How many games did I buy this system for? Maybe five or six right now …. after going through the list of PS3 exclusives (I will still play multi-platform games on 360 primarily), Motorstorm, Ratchet & Clank, Unreal Tournament, Heavenly Sword come to mind right off the bat, and Hot Shots Golf 5, just because it’s a personal favorite series.

I’m happy I got it. The 60 GB versions were getting nearly impossible to find in Columbus, and only through the good fortune of Game Rush not pushing them in my old home turf did I luck out and get the right kind. Happy it wasn’t used, happy to have the system, happy to go home tonight and finally get to play a PS3 game on it (instead of using Folding@Home, which is pretty darn cool!)

So this hits me as a bit strange. First of all, that my fantasy teams are better than my real favorite team, the Bengals. I would have never thought before the season began that they would be so bad, and they’re not going to get any better. Heck, their offensive MVP this week was Antrel Rolle … of the Cardinals!

But maybe stranger, or maybe this is normal (some other fantasy owner can shed light on this?) is that all three of my fantasy teams share the same record 11 games into the season … 6-5. In all three cases, it has be competitive but not secured in the playoffs … one spot out (and a half a game in each) in my ESPN and CBS leagues. In the Yahoo league, I’m one game out of the lead in what might as well be our All-Pro league (even though I had to pick up Ryan Grant to have enough running backs … cursed depth), and in second of six due to points. I figure it means I’ve been a very average fantasy player, for one reason … if you’re average, you’re going to be over .500 because there is the one or two players in a big league that stop caring, and thus become obvious wins (except when I lose to the 0-9 team in the ESPN league …. grrrrr!), so the true league average record is more like .550 or .600. All in all though, I guess that isn’t bad when you figure that by me not having any Patriots in any league I do, I’m doing a good job of picking the best of the rest.

By the way. Is it a sign of sickness that in anger at my own team’s ineptitude on Sunday, I began to be happy that Anquan Boldin was earning me fantasy points?!

I have a Yahoo E-Mail address. I even pay them nice sums of money on a yearly basis in order for me to continue to reap the benefits of said e-mail address ($20 a year to be exact, really not bad for what you get). Been using this e-mail address for upwards of seven or eight years, haven’t minded a bit.

Google just saved me an Andrew Jackson every year though, and it was easy to do!

For those who don’t know, GMail how has IMAP functionality. When you change something in the web interface, it changes everywhere. No more having to manage e-mail in seven places, one change affects all. It’s like Exchange Servers without the Microsoft aftertaste (which I don’t mind btw, but that’s for another day.)

So, I went ahead and made the plunge and decided to switch to an e-mail address for this domain through Google Apps For Your Domain. All the same GMail features, your own e-mail address (and tremendous administration tools). I can have up to 50 users if I want too, not that I’d ever need that many. And, I decided to begin to use my gmail.com account since I now have a lot of stuff tied into Google on that login.

My e-mail client of choice is also Thunderbird. It’s open source, can be portable, generally easy to move from one machine to the next, and very powerful. It integrates with GMail’s IMAP very well, but with a few tweaks, it becomes completely seamless to go from web to client, even to phone. This LifeHacker article is all over that.

I could not be more thrilled to make the change, I will even be migrating the wife to GMail this week so she can use a real e-mail client (and a real laptop) for accessing her e-mail. Well worth the effort in setting up.

Technorati Tags: Thunderbird , GMail , GMail Apps For Your Domain , Lifehacker , IMAP