My electronics are a mess.

I live in a very small 1-bedroom apartment, yet I own a 42” LCD monitor, a Denon 3808ci AVR receiver (weighing in at a more-than-respectable 39.2 lbs.), a Sony DVD jukebox big enough to hold 400 discs, a TiVo Series 3, A panasonic Blu-ray player, and an Xbox 360. On top of that, and in the same space, I have a powered external eSATA drive attached to the TiVo, a MacMini with two more external drives to house the 400 DVDs that I am ever so slowly ripping, an Apple Airport Extreme sharing the cable with the TiVo, another external drive attached to the Airport for network storage, an Apple tv to download hi-def flicks off iTunes as well as play said ripped movies over something that can actually handle hi-def streams, and I’ve just added a Playstation 3 because I got it for less than retail on eBay and I am anxiously awaiting the releases of Killzone2 and Little Big Planet for hours of useless playtime.

All told, that makes fourteen power-sucking boxes, six ethernet connections, five thick HDMI cords, 7.1 speaker cables, various USB connections and a spider’s nest of tangles stuffed behind a rather ugly but serviceable wood and glass stand that looks awful.

I have been looking and looking and looking for someone out there to make a simple, stylish, elegant media console that will allow me to display the electronics I want to display (namely, anything that I want to control via my Logitech Harmony 1 universal remote) and hide the electronic I want to hide, while also being able to somehow manage the tangle of audio, video, networking and power cords sprouting from the back of everything!

Is that such an impossible goal?

Continue reading "Wanted: A Good Media Console"

I watch Boston Legal because occasionally I get to sit through one of Alan’s rants, which generally are Liberal bet-wetting screeds that I can get behind on my couch and cheer without actually getting off my ass and doing something.

Case in point, last night’s “the Supreme Court is a highly-biased institution lately peopled with horrible, narrow-minded Neo-Con underlings.” Here, below, Alan Shore argues for a mentally-disabled man on death row by taking the nine to task.

It’s over 10 minutes long, but I love it when Alan gets going, and particularly here against one of the United States’ more awkward and backwards-progressing (assuming that’s even a correct term) institutions.

It was very chilly and I was standing at the wrought iron gate that leads to my doorway in my bare feet and a thin T-shirt and still unshowered and there they were, the two of them, one young-ish and one quite the opposite, both staring up at me with Bibles clutched to their bosoms.

The older woman had rhumey eyes, at least that was the word that popped into my head when I looked at them. They seemed too large for her face, which was leathery and wrinkled and shiny. Her lips were large, when she spoke in her halting fashion I could not look at anything but them. First her eyes, as you do when speaking to someone, then her lips.

She thanked me for answering the door, which I thought was odd and pitiful but probably not unreasonable, and handed me a small leaflet that I knew I should have just refused because I would be throwing it in the trash almost immediately, but which I accepted out of kindness (in my perception, anyway) and inevitability. I glanced at the back and there it was. “Watch Tower.” And I knew I was in for it.

Continue reading "The Witnesses"

Ninja Gaiden 2

Just spent a few minutes rummaging around at Amazon and collected a few pre-release Xbox 360 titles in my shopping cart:

• April 3, 2008: Ninja Gaiden 2
  Bloodiest game ever?
• June 4, 2008: Lego Indiana Jones
  Lego Star Wars was HY-larious!
• July 3, 2008: Fracture
  Weapons-based geographic deformation? I am so there.
• July 3, 2008: Too Human: Part 1
  Or too boring?
• August 28, 2008: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
  Hey, Luke, who’s your daddy, now?
• September 10, 2008: Borderlands
  Sci-fi Oblivion?
• October 1, 2008: Alan Wake
  Serious bump in the night.
• October 1, 2008: Fallout 3
  Post-apocalyptic mayhem from the Oblivionators.
• October 2, 2008: Prototype
  Looking seriously sharp.
• October 3, 2008: Resident Evil 5
  Slow zombies? My favorite kind! Oh, wait, those aren’t slow!
• December 3, 2008: Fable 2
  December? As if.

Fable 2

I’m assuming that most of those release dates are blue-sky estimates, since anything farther out than April hasn’t been actually announced. You might also notice that there’s one big title noticeably absent: Grand Theft Auto IV, due out on April 29th. I’ve played two other GTA titles on the PS2 and that particular genre of game doesn’t seem to be my bag. I don’t enjoy playing a bad guy, and I usually found the gameplay frustrating since I’m in no way a console controller jockey. The new one looks promising, but I’m withholding judgment until someone I know and trust tells me it’s worthwhile.

Continue reading "My 360 Queue"

Possibly my favorite Kids in the Hall skit ever.

“Two things come up that are prevalent with the creation of these games. One, is the mental psychosis of the vulnerable adolescent or young adult, who are gullible to these fictions. The second is the fostering of specific types of “virtual world” games— supposedly designed for mere entertainment, such as the hedonistic Second Life, or Halo 3. Either way, the dehumanization process occurs in any instance, by the first-person shooter games’ precision to kill another object, or by the adoption of an arbitrary set of anti-scientific, anti-principled rules, like that of Second Life, or even the great Ministry of Truth—Wikipedia.”

Halo 3: The ‘Third Wave’ of Destroying the U.S.
by The LaRouche Youth Movement Counter-Intelligence Team

And man oh man, “counter-intelligence” has never had a more apt usage.

My own short but sweet pre-emptive Halo 3 review, having played only the first two chapters and, to be perfectly frank, never having played a Halo game before: “Repetitive and frustrating.” Though it does make me appreciate Gears of War and Bioshock a lot more.

After washing my hair this morning, and setting the 16oz bottle back on the wire rack housing my myriad bathing products, I was reminded of the trouble Robert had, once again, when trying to get through security so he could board a 1-hour flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He had taken with him a jar of hair gel containing a smidgen of said product and a tube of Kiehl’s face moisturizer, both of which had passed muster here in San Francisco where, one must assume, the TSA agents are familiar with and forgiving towards a man’s need for grooming accessories.

LAX, however, was another story. The surly, self-involved, obnoxious security agent there refused to allow Robert to return home with his half-used goods, and made him dump them in the trash or “check them through.” Me, given enough time before my flight, I would have left the line and gone back to the check-in counter and handed them those two bottles to check as luggage, just because I am both annoyed at this continual process of stripping away my dignity and the wholesale, baseless rules that stem from singular and unlikely situations involving not-me.

So I think the market is ready for a new airline that caters to people like me, who are more than willing to place their own lives in jeopardy as long as we can get on board our flights without being subjected to shakedowns and feel-ups.

Terror Air will allow anyone to get on board the plane without removing their shoes. They can take the toiletries they need with them without having every bottle weighed and measured. They can bring lighters on board. They can bring bottles of any beverage they want, whether they bought them in the airport terminal or had the audacity to bring them from the outside world. Check-in’s are handled quickly and efficiently. No, you don’t have to remove your laptop from its case. No, you don’t have to take your belt off. No, you don’t have to empty your pockets.

Sure, the chances that a terrorist intent on blowing up a plane are likely to multiply if given the option of using an airline whose concern for its passenger’s comfort and convenience outweigh its concern for a possible terrorist’s seating assignment, but the odds are in your favor!

And wouldn’t it be nice to go to the airport and not be treated as a terrorist — even if you are one?

(See also: Switching)

I have officially made a big change in my life, and I’m glad you’re here to listen to my story. I’m sure I’m probably like a lot of you, and my story may be familiar to some of you. It’s a sad story, in places, and in some others angry, and by turns both frustrating and annoying (in as much as those can be separate experiences), but in the end I hope my story will help those of you still stuck in the place where I was, and may show you the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am a Mac owner. A double-Mac owner, in fact. And here’s how I did it.

Continue reading "Switched"