… where is your god now?

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6159158.html

Last month, McDonald’s introduced a line of Happy Meal toys featuring Nintendo mascots like Mario and Donkey Kong. As part of the company’s image-reworking emphasis on fitness, each of the toys had a physical activity focus.

Today, McDonald’s rival Burger King officially announced a campaign that takes a different tack to a gaming tie-in. Instead of offering toys that evoke games and promote activity, the fast-food chain is going to offer three Xbox and Xbox 360 games of its own this holiday season, each of them slathered with Burger King branding like so much mayonnaise on a Double Whopper with cheese.

Burger King’s plans to get into gaming were originally leaked in April by a company doing market research for the fast-food chain.

Pocketbike Racer will feature a number of Burger King mascots, including the King, the Subservient Chicken, the Whopper Jr., and former host of E!’s Wild On series, Brooke Burke. Five levels will be included, as will multiplayer races for four people on the same Xbox or Xbox 360, or eight people online over Xbox Live.

Big Bumpin’ also takes a lineup of BK mascots and pits them against one another in vehicular competition, but this game isn’t a race so much as a bumper-car ride. The game features a number of theme-park settings and on-track hazards like saws and bottomless pits, as well as bump-pumping power-ups. Big Bumpin’ will also have four-player action and online multiplayer support.

Finally, Sneak King takes the stealth action genre and puts it to a friendlier use than usual. Instead of tiptoeing behind enemy guards to silently snap their necks, players will sneak up on hungry people to surprise them with offerings of Burger King food. Gamers will have to sneak up on people in a logging yard, a construction site, downtown, and the suburbs, and they will be graded on their performance “based on how elaborate the delivery is executed.”

…

The three games will be playable on either the Xbox or Xbox 360. They will be available from November 19 through December 24 at participating Burger King locations for $3.99 with the purchase of a value meal. All of the games are rated E for Everybody.

[UPDATE] It appears that the fast-food promotional tie-in isn’t the only first that can be attributed to these games. “These are not backward-compatible original Xbox games, but truly designed and developed for each platform separately,” the Burger King representative said. “There are two versions on each disc, specifically made for each platform. This has never been done before for a title.”

…. er, right. I’ll have to pick up a copy of one of these next time I’m going through the drive-thru at the BK by my office, just out of sheer morbid curiosity…

The horror of the irony could not be any more obvious.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

http://www.hcnonline.com/news.cfm…rfi=6

A Caney Creek High School dad is fired up because the Conroe Independent School District uses the book “Fahrenheit 451” as classroom reading material.

Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.
“The book had a bunch of very bad language in it,” Diana Verm said. “It shouldn’t be in there because it’s offending people. … If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
Alton Verm filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” Thursday with the district regarding “Fahrenheit 451,” written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”
He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain. He said the book’s material goes against their religions beliefs. The Verms go to Grand Parkway Church in Porter.
“We went them to go after God,” said Glen Jalowy Jr., Grand Parkway Church youth minister. “We encourage them that what you put in your mind and heart is what comes out.”

…

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
“Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read” is observed during the last week of September each year, according to the American Library Association Web site, www.ala.org. The week celebrates the freedom to choose or express one’s opinion, even if it might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them, according to the Web site.
Jerilynn Williams, Montgomery County Memorial Library System director, said Banned Books Week keeps the public aware that it is imperative to have access to information in a democratic society. Banning books causes libraries to limit access to information by withholding a person’s right to explore a wide variety of opinions to form their own opinions, Williams said.

And people wonder why Louie said he wanted to get the hell out of Conroe as quickly as he could… *shaking head and walking away*

Fun with Windows Vista…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I’ve been running Windows Vista for a couple of weeks now. All in all, I think I’m getting used to it. It certainly looks nicer than Windows XP did (I was using WindowBlinds to make my desktop look nicer), and some of the design decisions are rather nice.

Still, it’s definitely not without its drawbacks. So far I’ve encountered five different issues that royally annoy the hell out of me. Granted, only three of them are Microsoft’s fault, but it still irks me to no end. I definitely hope they’re fixed sooner rather than later.

  • ATI’s beta video drivers for Vista have really poor OpenGL support. I wouldn’t be quite annoyed by this yet if it wasn’t for the fact that Defcon apparently uses OpenGL for rendering, and the game runs slowly as a result. (By contrast, Counter-Strike: Source runs about the same as it did under XP.)
  • User Account Control is a pain in the ass. Not only is it very intrusive (stopping EVERYTHING while it waits for your prompt), it has a bug where if (My) Documents is on a network share, it can’t read the network drive and as a result a number of programs fail to install.
  • The built-in support for Windows Mobile devices (takes the place of ActiveSync) is buggy. Installing programs for the device doesn’t work as the program doesn’t recognize ActiveSync as being installed, and transferring files to/from the device never works (it copies maybe 40k and then crashes, severing the link between the PC and the device).
  • Logitech has yet to release SetPoint software (for the keyboard and mouse) that will work properly with Vista.
  • Winamp is my preferred media player. However, no matter what I do, Vista INSISTS that Windows Media Player be the default player for most media files. Granted, I might need to check WMP itself, but it’s annoying that I can’t just tell Winamp to be default and it’s automatically recognized. (Even if I go into the “default programs” place to change that on the Start menu, it won’t let me change media settings.)

Otherwise, Vista’s been working fine for me, and I’d rather keep it. Still, it makes my life difficult dealing with some of these issues. (I got around one, UAC, by completely disabling it.) Hopefully MS, ATI, and Logitech will fix the issues sooner rather than later. Ah, well.

EDIT – 7:57 PM – Well, this thread on the Winamp Forums explains what the problem with Winamp and Windows Media Player is: apparently there’s an extra step or two Winamp needs to add to the registry so that normal programs can alter the file associations without requiring administrative access. Ah, well, I suppose we’ll see that before the official Vista release.

Here’s hoping today ends up being better than yesterday.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I had an interesting day yesterday. Note that I didn’t say fun-filled. I had planned for some fun and meeting with Louie yesterday, but it didn’t QUITE turn out that way. The original plan was to meet Louie at his apartment at 11 AM so that I could talk to him about making his old Gateway PC a file/printer server. Then, in the evening, we’d go somewhere for dinner and drinks.

Instead, I got a call at about 7:30 AM waking me up. Apparently something had happened to the network at the company datacenter, and I needed to go down there and figure out what was up. The datacenter is less than a mile from Louie’s apartment, so I asked if I could go a TAD later. Unfortunately, with it being the end of the month, the answer was no, so off I went. I finally got everything fixed and was out of there by 9:15 AM. With an hour and forty-five minutes to kill, I drove to a nearby IHOP, and had breakfast consisting of a “Vive le French Toast” and three cups of coffee. I was done by 10 AM, so with another hour to kill, I went to the Starbucks at the intersection by his apartment complex and ordered a venti coffee while browsing the net on my phone. At 10:45 I made my way over to Louie’s.

If you’ve been paying close attention, you can probably guess what the horrendous mistake I made was.

Shortly after lunch, my heart started feeling tingly. It came and went, and I figured I could just ignore it… until we had gotten finished and Louie’s and were heading to my place. As I drove down Louetta, it started feeling worse, to the point where I realized I really needed to have it looked at. So, as soon as I got home, Dad drove me over to the hospital emergency room (with a stop at the emergency clinic that turned out to be closed).

It turned out that my guess was right: the equivalent of five to six cups of coffee in less than two hours had lead to an overdose, making me think I was having heart issues. They did an EKG on me, hooked me up to monitoring equipment, and did blood work on me; the end result was that my heart was fine. After that, Louie headed home and Dad took me back home.

So, I’ve learned my lesson: moderate my damn caffeine intake!

Ah, well… today will be spent catching up on my recorded TV viewing, as well as finally sitting down and watching The Chronicles of Riddick. Then, tonight, I’ll meet Louie for dinner and drinks (seeing as I didn’t get to do so yesterday). A nice quiet day is just what I need after yesterday… heh.

The Movie Phone Project!

D'Arque Bishop3 Comments

Yes, this is the project I had been working on… heh.

Anyway, one thing I enjoy doing when out of town is taking movies to watch, especially when on a long and boring flight. In particular, whenever I go on flights for trips involving Mortal Kombat Online, it’s a tradition for me to watch Mortal Kombat on the flight there. Up until recently, I would watch the movies on my laptop. While the screen is great for that, there are two problems: 1) you’re never sure if the battery will last the whole movie, and 2) you’re not given enough room. More than once I feared damaging my laptop on a flight because someone in the seat in front of me leaned back and cut my room down. Obviously, a different tactic was needed.

So, my first idea was to buy a portable DVD player. However, the problem with that is that I would be spending $200+ on a piece of equipment I would only use maybe once every couple of months, if that. That wouldn’t be a very good investment for me. My next thought was to buy a video-capable iPod. I use my iPod every day, so it wouldn’t be like it wouldn’t be used. However… I was loathe to spend $350 to replace a piece of equipment that still worked perfectly well. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that I DID have one item already that was capable of displaying video: my cell phone.

My cell phone is a Cingular 8125, which is really a rebranded HTC Windows Mobile 5.0 device capable of holding extra storage. I did some research, and found the tools I needed: a program called TCPMP (a media player for Windows Mobile), and Auto Gordian Knot, which can convert a DVD to XviD. After reading a tutorial, I tested using the movie Mortal Kombat: I ripped my DVD into a 475 XviD file, which I then copied onto my phone’s 2 GB MiniSD storage card. I then installed TCPMP onto the phone. Did it work? Well, see for yourself… :-)

Mortal Kombat on my Cingular 8125...

The movie itself runs great without any glitches, and there’s enough battery power in the device where watching the movie won’t kill it. I even stopped by Radio Shack on the way home and picked up an adapter that would let me use my headphones on the phone. The sound came through great. :-)

So, all in all, I think I’ve come up with a long-term solution for watching movies in planes. Fortunately I won’t get any hassles out of using this; I’ve already confirmed that these devices are fine on flights so long as you can show they’re in flight mode (all radio transceivers off). It’s the low cost solution to my problem, and it seems to work fine. :-) Now, to decide what OTHER movie I want in here…

What a boring weekend…

D'Arque Bishop

Bleh. I wish I could say this was a productive weekend, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

About the only thing that I can say I did that was constructive (other than meeting a friend for lunch Friday) was that I took a number of steps towards a personal tech project that I had been planning and working on. I’ll reveal more about that later, as I don’t really want to say anything publicly until I actually get it working. Also, it might sound a bit pathetically geeky… heh. Otherwise, most of my weekend was spent working on my PC and getting it back up to about how I had it before the wipe and reload in terms of functionality. It’s not been easy, as Vista tends to be really annoying in terms of program installation and compatibility. Still, I’ve been working around it.

The next couple of days should be interesting at work. Two of my IT coworkers (specifically, the network and system administrators) are leaving for a couple of days to go to New Orleans and see Monday Night Football at the Superdome. As a result, I’ll be more or less on my own doing support work. That’ll be fun, let me tell you. Ah, well… I’m sure I can handle it. It’s a good thing I’ll be at the office an hour early tomorrow, though, as it’ll give me a chance to catch up on some of my own work before the deluge starts.

Ah, well… guess I should finish up on this work I’m doing right now, and make sure everything else is running smoothly, and then consider sleep. Fun fun…