brian's blog

Toronto was an all-too-short trip. Highlights:

• Relaxed in Kitchener Thursday night at Shannon and Kevin's
• Headed to Toronto Friday night in Markus' shiny new Golf, then Markus, Daniel, and I hung out with Wolfgang and his roommate for the evening, hitting up their neighborhood
• Watched several season 1 episodes of Lost with Markus and Daniel Saturday before checking out the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, which was low-key, low-budget, yet very funny. After the Festival, we headed over to Jenn and Brian's for Jenn's birthday party.
• Activated my new H-1B visa status on Sunday at the airport and flew back to balmy Seattle. After having watched Lost, every little bit of turbulence freaked me out.

I'm in Waterloo. The United States' Thanksgiving means an extra-long long weekend for me. Spent pretty much the entire day in transit; getting from Toronto to Waterloo took nearly as long as getting from Seattle to Toronto, due to the freakish November snow storm.

I've definitely become used to mild Seattle weather (8°C) -- it's horrifyingly cold (-12°C) in Toronto right now, and I can barely stand to be outside for more than a few moments.

Anyway, enough weather. To all the Americans, happy Thanksgiving!

Fun night. After work today, a bunch of us headed over to Josh's place to play 2 Xbox 360s that Josh and Scott spent all night last night waiting to purchase. We had one hooked up to the TV, and one hooked up to a projector. We played Project Gotham Racing, Call to Duty, King Kong, and Tiger Woods Golf. Thoughts:

• The games aren't bad for first-gen titles, though it feels like they could have done much more; launch date constraints might have held them back
• The Xbox software experience is pretty slick; it feels like there's a lot of potential in this thing
• The gamer profile system is great. Since almost every game nowadays requires some sort of user profile, it's about time someone made a universal standard
• The controller is very well designed, and isn't too big
• The power adapter "brick" is huge; I'd be afraid to carry it around small children
• Why is there no way to network two Xboxes together for four player, dual screen action in PGR or CoD?

After that, we headed out to Black Bottle for dinner, and Del Rey for drinks before crashing back to Josh's for more gaming.

I see the following on the walk to the RedWest cafeteria this afternoon:

Weird! Is it toxic sludge? Is it a really, really, really bad case of algae? No! It's a crazy stunt to coincide with the launch of the Xbox 360.

Another shot (click on the pics for larger versions):

I'd like to get a system, particularly to play around with the Media Center pieces, but they're just a little too difficult to get a hold of right now, plus I'd like to wait (if I can hold out) for the first hardware rev in case there are any kinks to iron out.

What's up, Sony?

1) First you include exploitable rootkits on your "protected" CDs
2) Next, your quickly released rootkit uninstaller is anything but effective -- it just makes the problem worse
3) Then, you decide you're going to go and prevent people from selling or borrowing games?!

Music is one thing, but don't touch my games!

(They now claim they have no plans to use the technology in the PS3, but reading the language in the patent, it's hard to see what other "entertainment device" that plays "game software" they might be refering to.)

Okay, I'm quite behind in my posts. Who remembers Halloween?!

I didn't have a plan for a costume heading into the Halloween weekend, thanks to a super busy schedule at work and other things keeping me busy the rest of my time. But a quick trip in the U-District to Red Light and the University Book Store left me with an (admittedly not too creative) costume of a Mad Scientist:

Our team at work also had a small party in one of the larger meeting rooms with a party rental company bringing in blackjack dealers:

(I'm trying to look suitably "mad.")

Beyond that, no big Halloween party. Definitely disappointing, especially given the Waterloo Halloween party tradition.

From my snail mail:

Dear Sir: We regularly conduct review programs as an important part of the self-assessment tax system. We have selected your return for review. To determine if we have assessed your return correctly, we need more informaton."

Crap. This is the second year in the row the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency has knocked. And this time they want roughly 30 times more paperwork than the last.

Can someone please water my plants while I'm in the slammer?

(Ha, ha! In case the CCRA is reading, that's just humor us legitimate businessmen like to throw about.)

Canada people: Would you trade your sunshine and snow for this?

So depressing!