We've only been in this building for about six years now and our previous office also had elevators.  I am inquiring as to when some of us forgot how to use an elevator?

For future reference you must let people get OFF the elevator before you get ON or the whole damn system will fail.  Get the #### out of the way of the elevator doors when waiting for the elevator to arrive, and don't even THINK about trying to get in before we all get the #### out.

Failure to comply with these instructions may lead me to suggest to the good people in HR that some "facilities refresher training" may be in order and don't think I won't enjoy watching you squirm in class all day...

New Work Laptop

My current work laptop is a mess.  On top of being underpowered it desperately needs a reformat.  I'd reformat it myself but all the stupid applications I need are not necessarily available to me (gotta ask IT for access to the installation files) and some applications that auto update do not auto update well (break) if you go back to an early install that they don't expect.

Fortunatly we're getting new laptops and some nice second LCD monitors.  We got our nice Dell 20 some odd inch wide screens.  Good stuff and some of us have received our new laptops.  Of course with my luck I still haven't received my laptop because IT keeps calling me to schedule it when I'm not working.  They don't listen to my voice or e-mail auto replies so they don't know that I'm gone and demand I call them back right away... when I'm out for a week.  I told them when I'd be around and how I'd be happy to work with them to find a time that works for both of us... no response.

It doesn't help that you can't actually talk to the guy doing the work.  You see technically we don't have any "desktop" people in our office anymore so they hired a contractor from Dell....  but you have to talk to an actual IT employee to get a msg to the Dell guy and that IT guy always reminds you that he doesn't do any desktop work anymore....

Edit: They called to schedule it Wednesday, yay.

iGoogle

Typically my homepage is set to this homemade portal thing I have.  Basically that is a classic grey background with black text page (good old mid 90s webpage standard) with a table on it with some web links and a google search bar.  It has worked for a while.  Some friends even use the page despite the fact that I know they don't share the interests I do and the page is fairly duxup centric....

A week or so ago I found iGoogle (btw i think this Google thing is gonna catch on, get in on the ground level with me here).  I like some of the stuff although after about 10 minutes of adding widgets I found most if not all are crap, but that's the internet for you and I happily now have a "crap" tab for all that stuff.  I'm fairly sure you could kill a HAL9000 with all those things running at once.  I found that all I really needed was a clock and calender, weather thingy, a little stock tracker, a cool todo list (very handy) and some handy news feeds.

So you can't have two homepages right?  Well if you said no you can have two homepages, die, because I say you can't and that's that. TuPac is dead.

I was poking around iGoogle and found a couple handy bookmark gadgets but they all seem to have issues.  My favorite craps out on me with errors once in a while and they all seem useful if you have maybe half to a dozen links.  That doesn't work with my pile of links.  It also doesn't help that each widget only has so much customization.  You can't streach widgets over multiple iGoogle cells or adjust many of the fonts or etc.  It's all a cool system but like most portal pages out there once I start using it I feel it is far more limited than I thought.

I'm bummed out.  It's like I had something good there and blamo no links for me.

I'm sure someone might suggest using actual bookmarks inside the browser and iGoogle but I don't like the clicky clicky nature of bookmarks inside the browser.  When I hit the net I want to see my links right there not have to click around a list and folders and etc.

Video Games

Mass Effect (Xbox 360 Sci-Fi RPG)  Bioware has this wonderful ability to make very good games and without fail every single time inexplicably insert some absolute shit in them.  Sorry for the cursing but it is hard to drive home this point hard enough.  It's a good game, a little shaky in the frame rate, the third person shooting is not super satisfying but it works.  The voice acting is outstanding.  It also has hot alien (or non alien if you'd like), lesbian (but no guy on guy) sex.

Then you have stuff like the driving sequences that serve no purpose other than to maybe breakup the action.... with a driving game that feels like it was created in the late 1990s.  You're car is bouncy as crap, the terrain is painfully boring, you have two weapons that oddly enough can be outclassed at times by just exiting the vehicle and shooting your piddly little side arms...  The non main plot line missions always involve fighting your way along thru the same set of maps.  The main character constantly struggles with a sort of foolish bureaucracy despite the fact that he is pretty much free to do what he likes thru much of the game.  At some point I expected him to start complaining about his slow postal service or start putting up Ron Paul banners inside his ship.

Also there were some issues with the ending of the game.  The short of it being that they went out of their way to let us know THERE WILL BE A SEQUEL.  Almost like some Hollywood executive said "add this line so they know for sure".  Ignore the fact that had you been paying attention at any point in the last hour or so or read any of the dialog it was clear there would be another game.

Poker Smash (Xbox Live Arcade Game)  I don't buy many Xbox Live Arcade games.  Most I think are overpriced but I bought Poker Smash recently.  It is your standard layout with a bunch of playing cards in a tetris like column except they're moving up from the bottom and you want to eliminate cards by forming various poker hands starting with three of a kind before the stack gets to the top.  You can move cards side to side (letting them fall into gaps or quickly moving across gaps).  No up or down but you can use a supply of bombs that can blow up cards and let those above fall down.  They also introduce "challenges" that require you to say make four of a kind with jacks in a short amount of time to get extra money.  You also get bonuses for making several sets of hands with one move or a bomb.  The money you hear in the game can be used to open up new music, boards and other stuff in the game.  Way fun.

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII - I once heard that Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII was a bad game with some wickedly bad voice acting with borderline racist Japanese voice acting.  It's all true.  Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII is an arcade combat flying game.  The arcade flying and such are, ok.  When flying you can hear the voices (in English) of your opponents.  On top of the fact that they're painfully repetitive they all sound like they're done by your standard white guy doing a REALLY bad impression of your opponents.  Maybe it is all meant to be cartoonist or even a commentary on some of the racist propaganda of the time. . .. no that's thinking too much but damn.  The Japanese voice acting really is the worst.  It seriously sounds like some white dude trying to do a racist impression of well any person of eastern background.

Gamespot

A while back there was some controversy regarding the firing of Gamespot.com editor Jeff Gerstmann.  I've assumed there was A LOT of inappropriate crap that goes on in the gaming media, but for the most part I felt comfortable with the folks at Gamespot.  I worked (volunteering forum moderator) with some of them and chatted with them on and off and while I didn't always agree with them on some things I felt most who I talked to were on the up and up, at least as much as anyone can believe in such a situation.

So Jeff got fired, there was a lot of "uh Jeff's firing had nothing to do with that review and a sponsor pulling their lucrative adverts from our site" -CNET stuff but the slow leakage of people from Gamespot, and frankly some of my conversations with folks there indicates otherwise.

Anyhow so what is a gamer to do?  Let's face it there aren't many options when it comes to the big sites.  1Up.com - The community is crap.  Are these reviews or blogs?  IGN - Long detailed, dry as heck reviews.  They hand out high scores for games like they're going out of style (granted many sites do that but it still sucks).

There are a lot of other sites out there and I'm surfing them around but they're all meh so far.

I Hate DRM

Actually I've yet to post my political stance paper (whatever it is called) on DRM.  My campaign contributers are currently witting that for me.

So I have an Xbox 360 and you can buy these smaller games via Xbox Live Arcade.  A while ago my 360 died due to the Red Ring of Death (common issue).  I got a new box and went to play some games and blamo one will not play, or more accurately it acts like the demo version (demos and full game are exactly the same size DRM controls what you get).  Also my other games ONLY work on when I'm connected online, before I could play them off line.  See the 360 has a couple serial numbers that it uses to verify if you can play the game.  Why the difference between one game and all the rest i'm not sure but my DRM is wonky.  A three hour phone call with people who don't speak English and I get to talk to someone who sounds like they know what my issue is.  "It is a DRM issue, we'll call you in the next five days when it is fixed."

A month later, no answer.  I call back "Oh it takes a month to fix that issue and yours was only submitted on the 17th..."  yay, two weeks later after I first called.

As for the PS3 it doesn't have such a DRM system.  Although, based on the rest of Sony's online approach I think this has a great deal more to do with Sony's laziness rather than any customer friendly aproach.  I wouldn't be surprised to see this change.

Super Bowl

There apparently was recently a Super Bowl.  I much enjoyed watching the Giants of NY defeat the Cheater Patriots of New England by passing around an oblog ball in a particularly spectacular fashion.

Blog

Every once in a while I get the temptation to start up a blog.  No not this one here.  Just my own site where I type some stuff like all the others.  Topics would be Video Games, my poor attempt at photography, life lessons learned, and I was thinking of posting a youtube (or whatever video host) series of videos where I eat new things from the grocery store that I have not eaten before.  It wouldn't try to be funny, just me, eating something, a few comments, end.  It would be cool to have the blog have sort of tabs at the top of the page that would filter content by topics like All, Video Games, Food Eating, Other rather than the usual deal where there are just links that then present a list of those posts.  Maybe it is just an aesthetic thing but I think of those two things as different.  I don't want to hack apart some blog code to do that.  When I played with blogs a while ago i found them kinda pain.

I hope this temptation passes as I don't need another project I'd feel guilty for neglecting.