Jon’s Geek Stuff … & Stuff

November 27, 2006

Playing with my Wii (Repost)

Filed under: Fun-Stuff, Wii — jon @ 7:55 am

Just before midnight, Saturday night, I told my wife that I was going to run out and pick something up at the store. Little did she know, I was going to pickup my pre-ordered Nintendo Wii from a local Gamestop. I arrived at Gamestop right around midnight. The store was already open and there were a whole 2 people in line ahead of me. After about 5 minutes of waiting in line and watching a young guy play Excite Truck on the demo Wii, it was my turn to checkout. I had pre-ordered the Wii, 1 extra Wii Remote & Nunchuck, Excite Truck, and Zelda.

The gentleman who runs the Gamestop told me that when he took the pre-orders he was unaware that the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck had to be purchased separately. By the time he found out, it was too late to call everyone and tell them they needed to put another $10 down for the Nunchuck. He also didn’t want to bother people with it so they would have a good experience with their purchase. He spent money out of his own pocket to put down the $10 hold fee for all the people who pre-ordered the extra controller. He was only hoping to re-coupe the $10 from people but seemed to be willing to take the hit because of the mistake. Talk about good business. I willingly gave him the $10.

The employees also had Wii Beanies. I tried to talk them into giving me one. For an undisclosed amount one of the employees gave me his.

I took pictures of the Wii as I unpacked and hooked it up. Click here to see them.

I’ve been very pleased with the Wii. The included Wii Sports game is amazingly fun. My wife and her two sisters have been playing the tennis game. All three of them played on the tennis team in high school. They really loved playing the Tennis game. The only complaint I heard was, ”This will be even cooler when we can get 2 more controllers. One sister said, ‘This is addicting’.

The other sister sat watching my wife and I play the boxing game while she ate her breakfast. She said, ’you guys look really funny swinging your arms like that.’ Then, we came home later to find her and her friend playing the tennis game and having a great time at it.

On Sunday Evening, a 14yr old boy we know was talking on his cell phone to a friend that had also purchased a Wii. His friend wanted him to come over and play sometime this week. He stopped by our house for a moment on Sunday night and to his surprise we my wife invited him to play Wii Sports for a few minutes. He was totally stoked at the opportunity to play.

When he left the house he said, ‘This has to be the best system that Nintendo has released, I bet this is much more fun than playing the PS3′.

To sum it all up, I’m very happy with the Wii. The only problem that I had with it is that I set it up connect to my wireless network. When the setup was complete, it told me it needed to go get an update. The update failed immediately. I check the logs on my firewall and it had no entries for the Wii trying to access the Internet. I still have to resolve this problem. Once resolved, I will have no complaints.

I love playing with my Wii!!

November 17, 2006

Deconstructing a ‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Trojan

Filed under: Security — jon @ 8:23 am

http://www.eweek.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=25954&a=194164,00.asp
Interesting graphics relating to the latest Spam Surges.
The most interesting is the pie chart that shows the highest percentage of machines acting as spam bots are Windows XP SP2 machines.

Link to eWeek article

November 14, 2006

TechTV being resurrected as UndoTV.com

Filed under: Fun-Stuff — jon @ 1:35 pm

http://www.twit.tv/2006/11/12/undotv_is_here
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71595-0.html
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/08/14/techtv-undotv/

November 13, 2006

What works and what doesn’t in Virtual PC 2004

Filed under: Virtual — jon @ 9:15 am

The unofficial list for what works in VPC 2004 has been updated.
RSS Feed: http://vpc.visualwin.com/vpc.rss
Complete Listing: http://vpc.visualwin.com/

IE7 installation command line switches

Filed under: Browsers — jon @ 9:10 am

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;927677

Microsoft Launches IT community social networking site

Filed under: Fun-Stuff — jon @ 8:49 am

The site is called AGGREG8
Link to Microsoft site http://aggreg8.net/default.aspx

Link to slashdot where I found this info http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/12/0543206

 

Google Earth in 4D

Filed under: Fun-Stuff — jon @ 8:10 am

Google Earth has gone 4D. You can now view maps from times in history.
more info: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=387.

November 10, 2006

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARINES!!!

Filed under: Military — jon @ 3:32 pm

Commandant’s Birthday Message (PDF)

New Marine Corps National Museum
President Bush presides at the dedication of museum
Quick Video of Museum

Chuck Norris Visits Camp Fallujah (video)

USMC

November 9, 2006

Microsoft Photosynth

Filed under: Interesting — jon @ 2:38 pm

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

The release is just a Technology Preview so it may not be compatible with your system.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds cool though!!

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

November 8, 2006

Windows Vista is RTM

Filed under: Windows — jon @ 1:04 pm

Windows Vista is finalized.
http://on10.net/Blogs/jesse/windows-vista-is-rtm-a-new-era-of-desktop-computing-is-upon-us/
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/windows-vista-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx

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