Sun Breaks

Well, a front moved through over Thanksgiving and managed to sweep out the fog. I can once again see the Cascade mountains from the second floor TV room. We were even greeted Sunday morning by a light dusting of snow. That's something you don't see around Seattle very often. It's even more rare in Las Vegas, where I'll be heading at year end for the Consumer Electronics Show. That should be fun. I've never been before. The only downside is that I need to be there on New Year's Eve and the best hotel I could find at this late date was the Comfort Inn near the Convention Center. Gee, celebrating New Years at the Comfort Inn. What could be better? The good news is that I'll be moving over to the Stratosphere the following night.

And speaking of consumer electronics, I spent a good chunk of time over the holiday trying out my Xbox 360. So far I've played PGR3 and PDZ--both are great games, IMO. PGR3 has a fantanstic "Camera Mode" for taking still photos of the action. I spent a few minutes getting some beauty shots as well as an action shot of me about to slip past an AI driver in London. It made me wish Flight Sim had something like that. PDZ was a totally different experience. It's a spy-themed FPS and I'll be darned if I can figure out how to use stealth to accomplish the missions. Seems I always end up drawing the attention (and gunfire) of the baddies. (BTW the opening video is pretty awesome, too.)

What's not so awesome was the time I spent trying to get on Xbox Live and figuring out how to stream music and pictures from my home PC using Windows Media Connect. I think the issue with Live was the router I'm using. Direct connection to my cable modem works. My router is Belkin and not very configurable. Steve Lacey suggested Linksys. Looks like a hardware purchase is in my future. As for WMC, it was completely opaque. I don't know how we expect average users to figure this out. (And based on the Xbox forums many of them aren't.) Naturally Lacey got his to work fine on the first try so now I have to hate him. Nonetheless, late at night when no one else in the house needed an Internet connection I did get some time in on Live. Here's my gamertag:

See you online!