The Richter Scale^®

A couple of weeks ago in New York City I was lucky enough to score two Nintendo Wii consoles with merely a 2 hour wait in line at the Times Square Toys R Us. I received a ticket to purchase a console when I joined the line, and I roped in my nine year old son to get a ticket too. See pictures below of us in line, along with some new friends, with our tickets; Wii boxes stacked up at the Toys R Us; and my son Bas and I with one of our Wiis.

One of the Wii consoles has been sent on home to Bonaire via slow boat, but we managed to install the other one last week at the in-laws while visiting for Christmas, and it was great fun. We now have the same Wii set up in our living room on our big screen and it’s still fun.

Nintendo has, in my estimation, never been stupid - foolish and foolhardy yes, but not stupid. And the Wii is no exception. While the Wii has been derided by game mavens as having mediocre graphics, the fact is that the Wii is designed to be used with just about all existing televisions. Okay, so it doesn’t look as crisp and awe inspiring as an Xbox 360 or PS3 running in high definition with an appropriately designed game title and all the right cables, but most real folks don’t have HD TVs yet.

So, in contrast to the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360, for which an HD TV is pretty much required, the Wii is effectively plug and play with current display technology (but get a component video cable if you want to get a bit better resolution out of it on a newer TV). And from personal experience, you don’t notice jagged pixels or fuzziness when you’re madly shaking your hands and arms to make your character on the screen run, jump, or whatever - you’re too busy playing the game using the Wii’s innovative input devices.

The three titles I have found so far that make the best use of the Wii remote (and Wii nunchuk in some cases) are the free Wii Sports game disc which comes with the Wii (features Baseball, Tennis, Bowling, and Golf), Excite Truck, and Super Monkey Ball. And the latest Zelda (Twilight Princess) is good too, but it takes quite a bit of game time to get to where you are using the wireless motion controls in a broad range of ways.

Super Monkey Ball in particular features 50 mini-games ranging from darts, running hurdles, races, space shooters, tightrope walking, and much much more. But even Super Monkey Ball probably only scratches the surface on original ways game developers will likely put the wireless controls to use in the future.

I have read and heard a fair bit of commentary from naysayers that the Wii is just a fad, and recreational gamers will soon tire of it, but I’m not so sure. There’s something very satisfying about being able to physically interact with a video game, whether it be swinging a control like a golf club in a golf game, playing tennis with the control as a racket, throwing darts, or even pointing the remote at the screen as an aiming mechanism for some weapon in a first person shooter. Certainly it’s a lot more natural to point your “gun” at a target than it is to use a joystick to rotate your view so that your cross hairs then line up on your target.

And while reports of television destruction and bodily injury from flailing arms, snapping Wii Remote restraint cords, and sweat-induced slipperiness abound, the experience in my family is that the greatest pain resulting from use of the Wii controllers is the day after vigorous play - muscle aches being the most common malady.

I am firmly convinced the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by mid-2008, if for no other reason than it will work very well with pretty much any TV already in use today, as well as new ones being purchased, combined with the fact that it’s much more attractively priced than the higher end alternatives, meaning it’s more accessible to a larger number of people. It also doesn’t hurt that the game titles available for the Wii are much more family friendly than those for the PS3 (and to some extent, the Xbox 360), at least as things stand now.

I give the Nintendo Wii a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading the freaking manual of any new device and gadget I get (and I have a lot of those in my queue right now). In geek lingo, that’s know as RTFM (and the “F” means something rather more crude than “Freaking” in case you hadn’t guessed.

This all stems from the fact that when we bought the house we are living in now, we remodeled and added ceiling fans to every room in the house. But, Bonaire has flaky power, and for the last two and a half years we have been attributing the fact that the remote controlled lights in the ceiling fans are sometimes dim and sometimes bright (changing over a period of months from one to the other, or at least so it seems) to that power instability.

So imagine our surprise when a couple of days ago we discovered that if we hold the “light” button on our ceiling fan remotes, the corresponding ceiling fan’s light actually dims or brightens gradually over a 10-15 second period from one extreme to the other. We have had dimmer functionality in the lights all along and never known it. Why? Because we didn’t RTFM. So, from now on, I will RTFM, even when the device is seemingly trivial, as everything is definitely not always as simple as it seems.

Google yesterday announced a new feature - searching and displaying U.S. patents. And as with everything Google does, this new feature is well implemented and easy to use.

The location for the Google Patent search is http://www.google.com/patents.

You can do full text searches on published U.S. patents (published U.S. patent applications and non-U.S. patents are not supported at this time, but Google has indicated that those may be supported in the future).

When you get a result list back from a search and click on one of the results (which will be a patent), you then have the option to read the patent pages, as well as search further in that particular patent - a very nice feature. If you opt to read the patent pages, they are brought up in special Google-developed viewer, with search terms highlighted on the page - also a very nice feature. However, it’s only as good as the OCR quality, as I discovered.

With my Patent Fetcher hat on, I am a bit relieved that Google is not offering PDF downloads of resulting patents, although frankly that would be a nice feature to have.

While dedicated patent search sites like Delphion are still far superior in some of their search capabilities compared to Google Patent Search, Google’s new search offering is vastly better than what the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office offers for issued patents, and certainly its patent viewing feature is very useful too.

More details to be found at http://www.google.com/googlepatents/about.html.

I finally got back home to Bonaire last night, and had my new PS3 waiting for me. I installed it using the regular composite video cable the PS3 comes with on the Samsung 32” LCD TV in my bedroom. I used the composite video cable because the TV only has one HDMI port, and that port was already in use by my DVD player.

Sure, I could have just gone and disconnected the DVD player, and used the PS3 to play DVDs instead, but that is a suboptimal solution, because the user interface for DVD playback on the PS3, well, sucks. Also, I have the DVD functionality programmed into my universal remote, and am too lazy to figure out if there’s a way to get the remote to work on the PS3.

I had anticipated this issue some weeks back, and had gone shopping on-line to find an affordable HDMI switch, as surely such an item must exist. And indeed, I found several options. I finally settled on a 5-port HDMI switch I found at Amazon.com from a third party seller.

That switch arrived today, so I unpacked it, rewired things, and found that for some reason the PS3 would not output image data onto the HDMI connection. Turned out to be a configuration issue in the PS3, so I switched back to the composite video view (which, incidentally, was really ugly relative to what I knew the PS3 could do - fuzzy and chunky graphics at 480 lines of resolution - yuck! Oh how spoiled we’ve become!), and reconfigured the PS3 to use HDMI as the output. My Samsung TV could do 720p and 1080i resolutions, testing showed, so I enabled that, and was off and running, and things looked oh so much better.

However, this would not have been possible without the 5-port HDMI switch I found at Amazon.com - it’s still not cheap at $124.99, but it works like a dream. More specifically, it auto-senses which of the five HDMI inputs have an active signal, and if it’s only one, switches to use that input automatically. That means it is wife-safe too. My wife is no dummy, but she hates it when she has to take extra steps to get something working like it used to, and with the 5-port HDMI switch, if she turns on the DVD player, and the PS3 is off (as it would likely be), it will all just work as it did before.

The 5-port HDMI switch is made by Monoprice, and the model number is HDX-501. It has five HDMI inputs, and one HDMI output. The specifications say it supports 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video formats, and that it also supports HDCP compliant video devices - something that is necessary for both 1080p output for Blu-ray movies on the PS3 as well as for some of Windows Vista’s forthcoming features. The unit comes with a remote controls, and a pair of AAA batteries are included as well.

I give the Monoprice HDX-501 HDMI Switch a 9.5 out of 10.0 on my Richter Scale. The only way to improve on it would be a lower price.

An interesting techie anecdote about HDMI switches, incidentally. I was in Tokyo last week, and visited Akihabara, the Tokyo electronics district, where every gadget known to man can be purchased. However, in asking around (using my Japanese-speaking guide, Junko) I was unable to locate any HDMI switches of any sort. We visited about a half dozen stores and stands, and in the final shop, that of one of the larger computer sellers in Akihabara, we were told point blank that while they knew HDMI switches existed, they did not yet exist in Japan. I found that statement amusing, since Japan is always apparently at the bleeding edge of technology, and the U.S. trails behind. Here was a case that appeared to be the opposite. In any event, in the U.S. you can definitely find HDMI switches. Ones that work well, at that.

Back in January, I covered the unveiling of the Sony Reader at CES in Las Vegas. At the time I thought it was a novel idea (pardon the pun), and wanted to spend some time with one. (See picture below of the Sony Reader, courtesy of Sony)

I finally got my wish - I ordered one back in August, and early November, I received my very own Sony Reader (and yes, I did pay for it). I have spent the last few weeks exploring its uses, benefits, and shortcomings and want to share those with you.

Let’s start by what the Sony Reader is, and then continue on with what it isn’t but what it wants to be.

What The Sony Reader Is
The Sony Reader is a piece of technology which can substitute as a book, or better yet, a collection of books. The internal memory stores a respectable number of pages in the form of one or more eBook files, and external memory in the form of a Memory Stick Pro or SD Card can add up to another 4GB of storage. Unless you are a total speed reader, that’s enough to keep you in words for years.

The Sony Reader uses a “digital paper” (a.k.a electronic ink or eInk) display which provides decent contrast in a reasonably well lit environment. Unlike a traditional electronic display, the digital paper consumers power only when the contents are changed, and as such Sony rates the Reader as being able to support 7900 page changes on a single charge. I have found that number to be unrealistic in the two times I have run out of power - I’m guessing (without having done any detailed experimentation) that in practical use, the number is maybe half that - maybe 3500-4000 page changes.

Because of the size of the pages (in order to keep them readable) a book which might perhaps be 300 pages in paperback might be closer to 700-800 pages (or more if you select the Medium or Large text display modes), so that means the battery use number is a bit misleading, as a typical Reader eBook has more pages than the paper equivalent. In other words, less books per battery charge.

Also, because of how the digital paper works, to change page content, the Reader needs to wipe the whole page to black and then draw the page. This causes a weird flashing effect which at first is annoying, but you quickly learn to ignore and then don’t even realize it’s there. It does make page “turns” rather slow though.

The best looking content for the Sony Reader naturally comes from Sony itself via Sony’s CONNECT service, which is integrated into the CONNECT Reader application which comes with the Sony Reader, and if you want to manage all of the content of the Sony Reader, that software is the only way to do at this time.

The Sony Reader comes with several eBooks preloaded, and excerpts from a number of others. Also included in the Reader is a PDF of the user’s manual, some pictures to demonstrate the monochromatic picture viewing capability of the Sony Reader, and some sample music files (the Sony Reader can play digital music files, but in a severely limited way - see below for more).

When you register the Sony Reader, and authorize the CONNECT Reader software (it can be installed on up to five computers, and you can also authorize several Sony Readers to view DRMed (Digital Rights Management) content), you also get a $50 credit at the CONNECT eBook Store. Sadly, even with the average 20% discount Sony provides on eBooks, they are still extremely expensive in my opinion.

Current titles can range in the $10-20 range, which I think is pretty ridiculous considering you cannot give the eBook to anyone else when you’re done with it, unlike a paper book and the overhead in releasing an eBook is minuscule compared to the cost of printing hundreds of pages on paper and then dealing with traditional book distribution channels.

Although, I will say that the $50 credit does help offset some of the initial umbrage at the cost of eBooks published by Sony CONNECT.

The Sony Reader promotes the ability, as an alternative, to display text, RTF, PDF, and Word files, as well as RSS feeds from Blogs is also somewhat misleading mainly because you end up losing real functionality when you try and import any of these file types.

For example, with text files, you need to provide text in paragraphs without a carriage return at the end of every line, otherwise you will likely end up with incredibly difficult to read pages with alternating long and short lines due to automatic wrapping.

With RTF and Word DOC files, you need to perform quite a bit of reformatting to get the files to be even moderately readable on the Sony Reader, and then includes font formatting too. And you have to have Microsoft Word installed on the system you use to import the RTF or DOC files into the Reader.

And don’t even get me started on PDFs. The display of the Sony Reader is pretty low resolution - perhaps a quarter or a third of a typical letter size page looks best on it. Now imagine shrinking a letter size page with typical 12 or 10 point type down to that size. If you imagine it must be difficult to read because everything has shrunk down to a much smaller size, you’re right. Most folks don’t have the expensive full version of Acrobat so they can’t make their own PDFs, but even if they could, extensive experimentation is required (and after a couple of hours I gave up).

And the promise of being able to download blogs is a laugh. There’s no way (at least not that Sony provides) to do it with just any blog. Instead you have to use the CONNECT Reader software and select among a very limited set of RSS feeds to fetch and convert to the eBook format, but in my tests I found that several of the referenced feeds (including Boing Boing) are no longer supported, and those that area produce horrifically formatted and almost unreadable output.

If CONNECT Reader was the only way to get eBook formatted files for the Sony Reader, I probably would have returned it. However the Sony Reader was not the first eBook Reader from Sony - they used to offer a product called the Librie. And it was out long enough that a number of enterprising developers have created some rudimentary tools to create LRF (non-DRMed eBook files) from text files and web pages.

In fact, the text to eBook converter tool I tried from the Yahoo Librie group downloads area (need to join the group first) is designed to take text files from the Gutenberg project (http://www.gutenberg.org) - a repository of thousands of book texts that have ended up in the public domain because their copyrights have expired. That includes works of folks like Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and countless others. So, if you don’t mind doing a bit of extra work, and like to read classics, this is a real option. Although with the Sony Reader eBook selection menu, it might take you a while to navigate through your book lists sorted by title, 10 titles to a page.

Another developer created an HTML to LRF tool which I found does a much better job of snagging blogs, albeit in a more unorthodox fashion as it doesn’t process RSS feeds, just the web pages. But it’s still not ideal for just that reason.

In any event, there are more tools being developed regularly for the Sony Reader/Librie, and I have high hopes that better looking eBooks from a large variety of sources are not far away. These tools will also make it possible for authors to self-publish for the Sony Reader, albeit without DRM (which is probably a good thing).

What The Sony Reader Is Not
Sony, for some reason I can’t fathom, built an MP3 player into the Sony Reader, but did such an incredibly poor job of it that they should not have bothered - it would have also probably saved a small bit of money in terms of additional components.

As I had previously noted, the Reader can take Sony Memory Stick Pro and SD Card media, and you can copy music onto those cards either directly or via CONNECT Reader. That part is fine. However, when the Sony Reader figures out what music it has available for play, it sorts it all in alphabetical order. There’s no way to set up a play list externally or internally, or sort by artist or album. The Reader simply starts playing the track you select and then continues with whatever the next song is alphabetically.

Furthermore, while you can read an eBook while the music is playing, the control interface to control the music is the same one used to navigate pages for reading, so once you move to eBook reading while music is playing you lose the ability to skip tracks, pause, rewind, etc. All you can do is control the volume unless you want to back up to the menu to switch to the music player interface.

The Sony Reader also includes a picture viewer, and that works a little better as long as you don’t mind your pictures being black and white and somewhat grainy. You can also set up a slide show to show images. I don’t see this as a particularly useful feature, but at least this one is a variation of viewing pages as opposed to the quirky MP3 player which just doesn’t belong (in its current incarnation) in the Reader.

Usability
Using the Sony Reader also takes some getting used to. There is an on/off switch, but instead of conserving battery life, it’s real purpose appears to be to prevent the buttons on the front of the Reader from doing anything if pressed by accident (something that is incredibly easy to do when you put the Reader down or put it in a backpack or pocketbook).

The Sony Reader also comes with removable/replaceable cover which protects the display, but in order to use the Reader you pretty much have to fold the front cover back behind the Reader instead of holding it open like you would a book. That’s because the only buttons to change pages are on the inside edge of the reader (either the two page buttons near the left edge, half way down in the image above, or the round button near the left bottom. This whole configuration makes the Sony Reader somewhat unnatural to use as a book replacement, although even this issue is overcome with time. Ideally the Sony Reader should have previous/next page buttons on the top (so you can hold the Reader with one hand when reading) and on the right side too, so that people who want to read it more like a book can do so.

The menu button and joy stick at lower right take some getting used to as well, especially in that it takes a number of painstakingly long seconds to get to a menu once you hit the menu button, and in fact perform any command.

The number buttons along the bottom of the screen have two purposes. The first is to provide a quick way to select a number menu function when a menu is present. The second is to go to a page in the eBook when you’re in reading mode. But no, you don’t punch in the page number you want to go to. Instead, if you press the 1, you go to the first page in the book, and the 0 gets you to the last page, and the buttons in between get you to an interpolated page number (5 is the middle of the eBook, for example). This means that if you accidentally brush one of the number buttons while reading you can pretty much end up somewhere completely different in the book. Then you have to go to the menu, select the History option and figure out what you really were last looking at before you jumped elsewhere and then go there via the history menu.

One feature I do like, however, especially as someone who has a combination of books and documents on the Sony Reader and reads some of them in parallel, is that the Reader remembers what the most recently read page is for each book you have looked at. That saves battery chewing page flipping to find your place (which is why I would do it with a paper book if I lost my bookmark). And speaking of bookmarks, there is a bookmarking feature as well.

Most of these nuances and annoyances are just a matter of getting used to the Sony Reader. I just wish it were more intuitive, more book-like.

The above notwithstanding, I have actually gotten rather used to my Sony Reader, and like having it available, although I sometimes have to work a bit harder to ignore its shortcomings. And while I still am planning on finding ways to get decent non-DRMed content for it, if desperate enough (meaning I’ve read everything I wanted to that’s already on my Sony Reader), I may plunk down some funds to buy some new books at some point (but not without complaining about the high relative price). However, I certainly do not plan on using it as a music player. That’s what my iPod is for.

In conclusion, I give the Sony Reader a 4.5 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

As an addendum, even though the eInk paper does not use any real power when displaying a page, the Sony Reader still needs to be turned off during take off and landing on planes because it is an electronic device with an on/off switch. So that means I still need some sort of paper book or publication to read to keep myself distracted at those times. That’s an annoyance too, but one I don’t see a work around for.

I found myself in San Francisco this week for a patent conference. During a free moment during the early part of the week I wandered over from my seminar to the Metreon - a Sony owned and operated facility which features Sony’s only west coast “PlayStation” store. On a whim I asked them if they had any PS3s, and got the expected response - “No”. But, I also got a “but, we had two shipments last week and expect at least one this week”. They gave me a phone number to call and invited me to call back during the week to check if any had come in.

Being the obsessed gamer I am (or at least, can be), I called the PlayStation store several times daily. Thursday morning, around 10:45am I heard what I had hoped - “They have arrived, get here quickly.”

Alas, I wasn’t that quick apparently, since when I arrived the line for people waiting to buy a Sony PS3 was already snaking outside the building. I estimate there were already 100 people there ahead of me. The store had not actually started selling the PS3s yet, so we all just waited. I had called my friend Ted Pollack (he runs an investment fund called the Electronic Entertainment Fund or just EE Fund) to see if he could join me and maybe even help me buy a second PS3, although with the line as long as it was, it was not clear if I would be able to buy even one PS3.

After a while a store employee came out to make an announcement which those of us in the rear could not hear. Turns out he had given stickers to people at the head of the line, and had run out about 15 people ahead of us. The stickers were effectively a guarantee that there would be a PS3 for each sticker holder. Discouraged, but not beaten, Ted and I pulled out of line, went inside near the front of the line, and I asked in a loud voice if anyone would want to sell their sticker and place in line for $200. Seconds later I was number 33 in line with a sticker.

The $200 figure was the premium I had earlier figured I would be willing to pay to get a PS3 before the end of the year. Capitalism is a wonderful thing.

I had several more offers to buy stickers from others in line, but I was tapped out, and Ted had to leave (and there was a strict policy of only selling one PS3 per person - they even did name matches with driver’s licenses to ensure that the same people could not buy more than one PS3 at that store, ever - or at least until supplies were no longer restricted).

And even as #33, I still waited. A cheer suddenly erupted from the front of the line - they had seen several carts of PS3s being wheeled into the store. The folks in line were all generally in high spirits - it was something of a party atmosphere. Names were exhanged, as were business cards. Some of my fellow PS3 squatters worked for the same local company (not mentioned here to preserve their jobs) and were all skipping work to stand in line. Others were students skipping class, much as I was skipping a session on Examiner Interviews at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But we were all in this together, even I as the sole sticker-buying interloper. We did all share in one consternation - the PlayStation store employee had apparently told those in line that only the first 26 were guaranteed 60GB PS3s (which have a few more capabilities than the 20GB models). I figured any PS3 would be better than none, although I certainly would have preferred a 60GB model myself.

But, my concerns were for naught, as another store employee came out a short while later to announce that all the incoming PS3s were 60GB models. More cheering commenced.

After about a half hour, the line finally started moving, with the store employees taking sticker-holding squatters one at a time, offering them a range of games (a rather meager selection, sadly) and accessories, and then taking payment. The whole process, while excruciatingly slow, was very well managed, ran smoothly, and everyone was exceedingly friendly and nice.

So it came to be that about two hours and a missed seminar later, I was the proud owner of a new Sony PS3 60GB system with seven games, three extra controllers, and a reader for PS2 and PSX game cards.

Goes to show that some lines are better than others. Photos from my line squatting journey can be found Here.

My next stop was FedEx so I could send my hard earned gains home to Bonaire, as I was continuing on to the orient before going home myself. But when I get home, I will have my PS3 waiting for me. Now to go buy some Blu-Ray DVDs on Amazon…

My family and I had a rare experience yesterday - we were invited to a friend’s home on Bonaire to meet former NASA Astronaut Charles Bolden. Charlie, as he asked us to call him, is on Bonaire with his wife and daughter as part of a week long visit to share his experiences - both on terra firma and in space - with children, teens, and anyone else interested, in the hopes that they will see that the sky truly is the limit in what one can accomplish if one works hard enough towards achieving one’s goals. 

Pictured above, in a photo by Bob Lassiter, are my family (Linda, Bas, Krystyana, and myself) with Astronaut Charles Bolden.

As part of his visit to Bonaire, Bolden will be announce the winners of several space related contests set up to coincide with his visit.

Never having knowingly met an astronaut before, we were pleasantly surprised to find Charlie to be a very warm, engaging, and just plain nice person. His friendly demeanor was even able to crack the usually shy facade our son Bas puts up when strangers try to engage him in conversation, and to my mind, that’s saying a lot. Charlie is sure to be a big hit with the schools he is visiting next week with his obvious charm and delight in sharing his world with children and adults alike.

The other thing which was unexpected, but in hindsight should not have been, was that Charlie was shorter than I had expected - and this was a common comment heard at the small reception we attended. One just assumes that someone who has exited the Earth’s atmosphere would be tall and imposing, but the hindsight comes in that U.S. Air Force pilots, and by extension, astronauts, have maximum height requirements due to the limited cockpit space and the extreme cost of space suits, which I understand to be produced to fit a limited range of body types.

My wife and I are pleased to have been able to help sponsor Charles Bolden’s trip to Bonaire, and hope that he will inspire at least a few of the youths on the island to reach for the stars.

I just finished posting the Bonaire Insider’s first ever review entry, about a fabulous dinner at the new Tex-Mex restaurant on Bonaire - Papaya Moon Cantina. You can see the full review here.

I went with my wife Linda, and our two kids, and we had a most excellent meal. I truly had never expected to have excellent Tex-Mex on Bonaire, so this was a very welcome surprise. My only dilemma is how to balance my newfound lusting after the Raspberry Lemon Tiramisu with my low-carb diet.

I give Papaya Moon Cantina a 9.0 out 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

A few weeks ago, my wife Linda and I were fortunate enough to have been invited to participate in a regional gathering of one of the organizations we belong to, the Chaine des Rotisseurs, a gastronomic association devoted to the enjoyment of fine food and wine. The regional gathering, known as a “Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs”, was organized by the Atlantic Caribbean Assemblage in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The Bonaire Bailliage of the Chaine des Rotisseurs, to which Linda and I belong, is actually directly under France, and not part of the Atlantic Caribbean region of Chaine, which is part of the United States Chaine. Nevertheless, we were invited because we are in the Caribbean and knew Drs. Marcelo and Virgen Oben, two of the organizers, whom we had met at a Chaine event in Curacao three years ago.

In sum, the long weekend entailed an evening with eleven of the best chefs of San Juan at a “Taste of Puerto Rico” dinner, an amazing wine tasting the next day, followed by a black tie French Gala Dinner Dance. On the final day we had a wonderful brunch. Linda and I also took an extra day to visit the famous Bacardi rum factory and go shopping. We had a very nice and relaxing time, made some new friends, and ate and drank very well.

Kudos to the Chaine Bailliages of Puerto Rico who hosted us and did an absolutely incredible job organizing and running all these events!

Instead of boring you with more written details, I will instead point you here to my photo gallery of our time in Puerto Rico at the beginning of November.

I finally got home to Bonaire a couple nights ago, and among the first things I did was hook up my new HD-DVD drive to my Xbox 360 (which is connected to my Samsung 62” 720p DLP via the VGA/PC cable). Installation was a breeze, although in hindsight I should have connected the USB cable to the back of the Xbox 360 before loading the installation software because as it was, I managed to unplug a couple of things in the back of my Xbox 360 when trying to cable things up during the software installation. I then put the new HD-DVD drive through its paces with “King Kong” in HD-DVD format (included with the drive - also included was an Xbox 360 remote).

I also dug out my regular wide screen version of King Kong for regular DVD playback, put it in my upscaling DVD player, and then sync’d up both the HD and regular titles to the same point in the movie so I could compare current technology (DVD) and new technology (HD DVD).

All I can say is “Wow!”.

I had not realized what I had been putting up with as “good” quality with my regular DVDs until I compared them to the output of HD DVDs. And it’s only going to get better once I get my 1080p HDTV delivered in a few weeks. Last night I watched “16 Blocks” on the HD-DVD drive, and was tickled to be able to read the print on signs, papers, and other props in the movie with great ease because of the image clarity.

Whereas there are all sorts of scaling artifacts in the DVD image, the HD-DVD image is incredibly crisp and a delight to behold. My only complaint, and this is a minor one indeed, is that the HD-DVD drive has no display on it to show me how far along into the movie I happen to be during viewing. I know I can get the Xbox 360 to show this to me on-screen, but it’s visually disruptive.

In any event, now that I have tasted HD-DVD, I will be hard pressed to go back to regular DVD where a choice between the two exists. And as I was one of the unfortunate many unable to procure a Sony PS3 on Friday, I won’t be testing Blu-ray DVDs any time soon, although I suspect the visual difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD to be minimal or non-existant.

One thing I do like about HD-DVD titles I purchased is that most of them seem to include a DVD version as well, so that in locations where I don’t have HD-DVD playback (like my notebook computer when I travel) I can still watch the movie without having to buy a second DVD-only copy (as if I would do that anyhow). And Amazon.com has a deal where if you buy three HD-DVDs you’ll get a 10% discount on all HD-DVDs in 2007. Nice little additional bonus.

Now I need to go buy another HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 in my bedroom… At $199 it’s a pretty good deal, I think.

I give the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.