Long time no post

In the meager time that I have to blog, I end up squandering all of it on my FFXI blog and completely neglect this amorphous, self-conscious little personal blog, mostly because I'm the only one who reads it and I dislike journaling anything (I know my life, I don't need it transcribed for posterity).

So I guess I'll sum up my geek-life interests as of late.

I purchased an Xbox 360 a few weeks prior to the release of Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion; and yes, this was during the period where you couldn't actually find them in stores... I heard through the grapevine (i.e. some random sales associate at Gamespot) that you could get them at Circuit City on Sunday mornings occasionally when the consoles happened to ship in small batches to the outlet here. I lucked out when I arrived about 20 minutes prior to opening time and received a purchase voucher from one of the sales associates who was monitoring the storefront for Xbox campers. There were a good number of us, and yes, we were very much the sorry bunch of store-camping geeks you're visualizing us to be. I walked out of the store with a shiny new premium package and absolutely no games to play on it (woot?).

A few weeks later I played Oblivion, and after the initial shock factor of the graphics wore off, I inevitably started comparing it to Morrowind and found it lacking in many areas. Once I adjusted my mindset toward playing the game, I could enjoy it once again as a mission-based hack & slash, but I had irretrievably lost the immersion the game was striving for in its grandiose over-budgeted visuals and touted 'Radiant AI' (whatever). And it was back to playing FFXI for the most part after that, especially when the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion arrived. To reinforce my Oblivion-defiled RPG hardcoreness, I bought this T-shirt, which has elicited exactly 0 questions and 0 knowing nods of recognition in any of my circles.

Sometime between Oblivion and the FFXI release on the 360, my High Def visual ennui began (curse you, Microsoft)... The 360 looked relatively terrible on a standard definition television. The console demands an HDTV setup, but since these are still far from affordable (I'd rather buy a computer for $2000 thank you), I've settled for using the first-party VGA cable and a good quality 17'' CRT aperture grille monitor I had used mostly with the Dreamcast. The picture looks pretty good, although all games default to widescreen resolutions, so I lose quite a bit of screen real estate. Another drawback has been the ridiculous setup time. Since I have no dedicated gaming space other than the living room, my VGA monitor setup has to be erected and dismantled every time I play, and that monitor is seriously heavy.

So, to preserve my lower back and my sanity, I've been shopping around for a good affordable LCD monitor. I eventually settled on a BenQ FP202W and purchased it from Newegg (after a negative experience with a similar Sceptre monitor which I returned to Costco for a full refund), only to discover that none of the resolutions on the 360 scale well to any current widescreen VGA resolution... period. Since all affordable (read <= $500) widescreen monitors auto-adjust the image to competely fill the screen, and most of these have a native resolution of 1600 x 1050, I'm basically screwed. I'm in the process of auctioning off the FP202W (which is great for PC gaming, just not 360 gaming), and looking for a good 1280x1024 19'' LCD in the $300-or-less range. I'm losing $100 worth of monitor budget since I'll probably lose that amount on the auction. To compound my frustration, my auction has been delayed by a week due to a sheisty Ebay bidder who retracted his bid once he hit my reserve price, probably in hopes of swooping in on the auction at the last minute and winning with the lowest possible reserve. This is against Ebay ToS, so I reported him and re-listed my auction, since he'd basically ruined it.

Other than my stupid technological obsessiveness, I've been enjoying my life as a sleep deprived father of two. When I have some down time tonight (hopefully... Scout decided to stay up into the wee hours and game with me last night, so we'll see), I'll blog a labor story for anyone other than myself who might be reading. I'm just not in the proper mindset to do it now (programming and labor stories just don't occupy the same brain space).

It's amazing to watch the minute details of Hunter's development as a little person, and it occurred to me today that I'll never be able to witness this again, at least not on this scale. Once he starts going to school, I'll miss out on those obscure developmental moments we all have during those early years and never completely communicate to anyone, not only due to our facility with language at the time, but because of the general ineffability of some those experiences. He'll gradually start to become a truly independent being with his own inscrutabilities. Watching Scout's growth will be different, since I'll be seeing it through expectations and assumptions that I have yet to develop, but inevitably will develop as I watch Hunter.