Author: Andrew Huey

PS3 observations

I’ve had my PS3 for a few days now, and I thought I’d share a few random observations. First, if you hook up a PS3, and then start to get an incessant buzz coming from your TV, you’ve probably got a ground loop problem. This thread at the Sony forums describes the problem quite clearly. I solved the problem easily by using a cheap three-prong to two-prong adapter from Home Depot. Still, it was kind of annoying working through it and figuring out what was going on.
I do like the PS3 in general, and I think that now is the time to buy one if you’ve been holding off. When it launched, I wasn’t too excited about it. It seemed overpriced for what it could do, and there were a few questions about stuff like backward-compatibility that hadn’t been answered yet. The 80 GB MGS4 bundle I bought hits the sweet spot in terms of functionality and value. It’s got WiFi and wired Ethernet. It’s got a reasonably large hard drive. It’s got a reasonable level of backward compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. And it’s maturing in terms of the software that’s out there for it. The downloadable stuff on the Playstation Network is pretty good. There are a few great games out for it — GTA4, MGS4, and a few others. And, like it or not, Blu-Ray has won the battle with HD-DVD.
I’m just starting to experiment with all the stuff the PS3 can do. I’ve watched a couple of regular DVDs on it, and it works fine as an upscaling DVD player. I’ve watched a few downloaded 720p movie trailers on it, and those look good too. I haven’t actually watched any Blu-Ray discs yet, but a friend gave me a copy of Ratatouille, so I’ll be checking that out soon. And I subscribed to Qore, which is kind of fun.

San Diego

There’s a great post over at The Beat on the San Diego con. It includes a short interview with David Glanzer. Some of the comments are worth reading too. As expected, four-day badges are sold out, and one-day badges will likely sell out too.

I think the con experience will be a little different for me this year, since I’m staying at a hotel that’s not in a reasonable walking distance of either the con or downtown. Since it won’t be easy for me to pop back and forth to the hotel during the day, I’ll probably wind up spending either more time in the convention center, or more time in the hotel. (I get the feeling that once I’m back in the hotel at night, I probably won’t want to bother making the trip back out to the convention center again for any late-night activities.)

Given the size to which the con has grown, I’m probably going to try to concentrate on stuff that’s outside the mainstream, and maybe look for some interesting off-site events, like the Rifftrax event I blogged about previously.

I’m actually wondering if there will be a lot of no-shows for the con this year, given the cost of gas, and the general state of the economy. Anyone who waited until just recently to book air travel may be having second thoughts, for instance. And I can imagine some local California folks who would normally drive to the con from, say, the LA area, skipping it this year.

Well, either way, I’m sure it will be interesting, and (as usual) a great change of pace from NJ in July!

video game stuff

While waiting for my new PS3 to arrive, I decided to dust off the PSP and play around with that a bit. I discovered that my battery could only hold a charge for about 10 minutes, which makes it pretty useless. I ordered a new battery from Best Buy, along with a new 2GB memory stick. My old memory stick was 128MB, and cost more, I think, than the new 2GB one. So, I now have enough room to copy some reasonably long videos down to my PSP, though there’s really not anything I’m interested in watching on it right now.

I also spent some time today playing Final Fantasy VIII on my PS2, which I haven’t touched in a long while. I did make some progress — I got past Norg, for whatever that’s worth. Despite the fact that I started this game in 2003 or thereabouts, I’m still determined to finish it at some point!

MGS 4

So I broke down and ordered the PlayStation 3 80GB Limited Edition Metal Gear Solid 4 Pack from Wal-Mart this morning. It looks like it’s sold out now, so I guess it’s good that I ordered it in the morning instead of waiting until I got home from work. I probably won’t get it for a couple of weeks, but that’s fine. I’m still really not that excited about the PS3, or MGS4 in particular, but it ought be fun to play around with. MGS has always been kind of a weird franchise, and I do enjoy the distinctly Japanese oddness to be found in MGS. And of course I’l use the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, though I’ll always be a little bitter about Blu-Ray beating out HD-DVD.

ASP.NET MVC

I went to the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC on Saturday. It was an all-day (9-5) event with several speakers talking about various aspects of the MVC framework, and some associated topics. Nearly everything that was covered was new to me. I’m somewhat familiar with the idea of the MVC design pattern, and I’ve played around with SubSonic a bit, but I hadn’t really read much of anything about ASP.NET MVC specifically. I feel like I’m pretty far behind the times, given that most of the stuff I do in work right now is still in ASP.NET 1.1.

I still need to learn LINQ too. I haven’t really had time to sit down and play with that yet either.

Microsoft stuff

I went to a Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event today in Edison. I had registered for the NYC event that happened about a month ago, but things came up at work, and I couldn’t make it. Stuff came up at work today too, so I had to skip the developer stuff in the afternoon. The morning track basically covered Windows 2008. It was pretty interesting, and I did learn some new stuff. They gave out a software bundle that included Vista Ultimate, VS.NET 2008, and a few other things. Honestly, the bundle o’ stuff is one of the main reasons I went to this event.

I’ve put off installing Vista on my main desktop machine at home, for a variety of reasons. Now that I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1, though, I decided to give it a shot. I’m not doing an upgrade install, though. I’m still afraid to try that. Instead, I’m wiping out my Ubuntu install, and putting Vista on my second drive. I’ll have XP on my 250 GB main drive, and Vista on my 100 GB secondary drive. I’m hoping that dual-boot between XP and Vista works out OK. I’m running the install right now; it’s been going for about 20 minutes. I think it’s almost done.

I also registered for the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC that’s coming up this weekend. It’s always a little hard to talk myself into spending a whole day indoors on a sunny Saturday, in a Microsoft office, but I really need to keep up with some of this stuff. And I think it’ll be kind of fun.

NY TImes: Comics

In today’s NY Times Book Review section, John Hodgman takes a look at some great comics, including Kirby’s Fourth World stuff, Eric Shanower’s “Age of Bronze” and Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” It’s great to see stuff like this getting covered in the Times, and Hodgman does a good job of summarizing this stuff for a general audience, without dumbing it down or over-generalizing or sensationalizing it.

RiffTrax Live in SD

The RiffTrax guys will be doing a live event during the San Diego con this year, riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space, at the Balboa Theater. This would likely be quite fun, though it’s on Saturday night, and there’s going to be a lot of other stuff happening on Saturday night. Of course, since this is a ticketed, off-site, event, this might be a good way to escape the craziness of the convention center for a little while.