The Richter Scale^®

I love being mindless at the end of the day as much as the next guy, and television or movies are a great way to escape the pressures of daily life, especially as a precursor to sleep. The boob tube slows one’s brain down and gets it away from worrying about reality.

Unfortunately, I find much of prime time TV to be annoying and more mindless than even I can stand. I also don’t like all the incessant commercials - and yes, I understand that the revenue from commercials ultimately supports the production of future episodes of television shows. I also don’t like having to be available at precisely the time the show starts (which becomes even tougher where I live because in the winter when the U.S. is on Standard time, we are an hour ahead - makes for late TV watching - a 10pm EST show is on at 11pm EST here on Bonaire).

You may respond “well, why don’t you just TiVo the shows”?

But that question exhibits a certain ignorance and lack of awareness of the world outside of the U.S.A.

I’m here on the island paradise of Bonaire where there is no zip code to plug into a TiVo box, and a TiVo box can’t dial out to a local number to get the latest program guides for Bonaire (which, face it, is a 110 square mile fly speck surrounded by water, offering a blend of legally and illegally received TV transmissions, by a population of around 12,000).

I have two TV feeds here at my house - cable TV (a hodgepodge of U.S., South American, and Latin America-oriented U.S. originated channels) and TDS - terrestrial digital TV beamed over from neighboring Curacao, offering more of the same. Typically at least one of these is not working. In other words, service and reception are rather unreliable. (A nice way of saying they suck.)

I also have a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed, and I’ve cobbled together a moderately functional program guide for that, but running that system at night requires hundreds of watts of power because without the air conditioner running in the office where the MCE PC is located, it would likely overheat and I would lose my computer to a meltdown.

So, with the exception of our near religious viewing of the latest episodes of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy (which we watch regularly mostly because it follows Desperate Housewives), we tended to play TV Russian Roulette - watching the least bad show of what happens to be on when we turn on the TV and hoping we don’t die of inanity overload.

But lately, we, like many others no doubt, have recently discovered the joy of TV shows on DVD - whole seasons of such shows in an affordable collection!

Our current favorite is Roswell - a three season show about attractive teenage aliens and their human friends living in Roswell, New Mexico - home of the mystery shrouded and fabled 1947 crash of a weather ballon / space ship. Great characters, decent plot twists, and not too intellectually “deep”. There’s enough romantic interaction to captivate the female half of a couple, and enough alien power display and alien-guys-trying-to-figure-out-women comedic content to satisfy the needs all but the most action movie jaded guy.

We’re about a third of the way into season 2 of “Roswell” now, and vastly enjoying the ability to not even have to fast forward past commercials, and starting and stopping at any time, on any DVD equipped TV system in the house.

With the kids, we’ve started with Star Trek - The Original Series so we can give them a sense of some of the TV origins of things like Star Wars (one of their obsessions at present).

Next on the list to consider buying are Lost - The First Season, and “24” - the Fourth Season (managed to watch most of the other three seasons on live TV, but just couldn’t manage that with the fourth season.

So hurrah for TV series on DVD!

Over the last few days, I’ve done a bit more in the realm of comparing current generation console output (e.g. PS2 and Xbox) with nexgen Xbox 360 output, and I must say, although in some games it’s subtle, the Xbox 360 does win hands down.

But I think that’s only because I am taking full advantage of the output quality potential of the Xbox 360 on my HD-ready TV, a 62” Samsung DLP.

My Xbox and PS2 are connected to my TV via component video (my GameCube uses S-Video), and are set to be aware of 16:9 format output.

But in planning for the arrival of my Xbox 360 I went and bought an Xbox 360 VGA cable, which outputs analog video at potentially high resolutions via a 15-pin VGA connector to any type of monitor which can support such a connection. I did not use DVI because my Samsung progressive scan DVD player is already connected to the DVI port on my TV, and I didn’t want to have to deal with a DVI switch box. The VGA cable worked great.

After organizing my Xbox 360 into my entertainment center (it sits on top of my PS2) I configured the Xbox 360 to output 1360 x 768, which is higher than the DVI connector to my TV supports. This does produce a very crisp picture compared to what I see on the Xbox or PS2. My wife even commented that the fog and snow effects in Call of Duty 2 looked realistic (high praise from her).

That said, I think a real HD-capable TV or monitor is a necessity to make an Xbox 360 useful. It’s a waste to use an Xbox 360 via composite, S-Video, or even component connections as you are still basically resolution limited, at least in comparison to the resolution potential available via the VGA cable.

But an HD ready TV with PC inputs will run you at least $999, plus another $40 for the VGA cable. Makes the Xbox 360 a pretty pricey toy.

If memory serves, it was ten years ago today, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, no less, that Microsoft woke up to the threat and potential of the Internet, and started its shift towards trying to dominate the Internet in all its incarnations in what has become known as Bill Gates’ “Tidal Wave” speech. It was also the same day Microsoft announced it had licensed Java from Sun Microsystems.

My how things have changed. So, how have they done in those ten years since December 7, 1995?

In my estimation, Microsoft has not done too badly. They went from underdog (a surprising term to use in the context of Microsoft) in the web browser market to pretty much obliterating market leader Netscape. They have made significant inroads in the installed base of web servers using Microsoft operating systems (although I believe Linux still has the majority), and with .NET and web services, look to slowly be steamrolling into dominance in that new market.

But all this connectivity and dominance has come at a price. Dominance creates a target, and in the case of Microsoft’s Internet strategy, the target is system security. Microsoft’s Internet enabled products, and their desire to extend standards with arguably powerful but proprietary features, combined with the sheer amount of programming involved, has led to an incredible number of security holes which nefarious hackers are constantly looking to exploit. So, while Microsoft’s operating system runs on the vast majority of personal computers in use today, so do today’s zombies, malware, spyware, and viruses.

The Apple Mac crowd chortles over this as proof that the Mac is superior to Wintel, but they only have the enviable position of being relatively infestation free because Apple has such small market share. It’s not clear to me whether the Intel-based Apple products due out next year will become a bigger target for writers of nefarious code, however.

The biggest threats to Microsoft’s continued efforts at Internet dominance take many forms, including from small but powerful on-going anti-Microsoft sentiment spurred on by fear of what a true monopoly might impose on its users resulting in people using things like the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client software (both excellent pieces of software, incidentally).

And witness the recent decisions in Massachusetts and elsewhere to go with open standards for office productivity software. Other threats include the proliferation of computer devices with niche focus, such as cell phones and cell/PDAs in which Microsoft is still a bit player. And then there are platform companes such as Google and even eBay (hey - they bought Skype - that’s not a pure-auction house strategy in my book).

It stunned me to read on some blog comment recently (and sorry, I didn’t take a link) where someone was happy that Microsoft was out there to stop Google. Used to be the other way around.

I’ll admit I have no idea what the next 10 years will hold for Microsoft, but 10 years ago I would have never guessed that they would have been so successful in turning around the focus of the entire company either. But back then, Microsoft was the underdog. Now everyone else is…

Being a gamer, it’s not unusual that both my kids are into video games too - I let them play with all my toys. Many an evening we’ll play together before it’s their bed time. Games we frequently play include Champions of Norrath (both versions) on the PS2, Star Wars Battlefront II (Xbox)(nice to finally be able to have more than two players - up to 4 in a cooperative mode!), Halo 2 (matches), and some various party games on the GameCube and Xbox.

That said, the Xbox 360 launch titles were a major disappointment.

Most of the games were definitely age inappropriate for 8 and 10 year olds, and I draw the line more liberally than some parents - shooting games are fine if they don’t involve modern age humans shooting each other. Games with bad language are also right out as are really bloody gore-filled games. Under those rules, Halo 2 is in, but any version of GTA, Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake, is out. So are GUN, Condemned: Criminal Minds, and perhaps Perfect Dark (need to play that more to make the call).

And, as my kids and I are not major sports fanatics, the bevy of Xbox 360 sports games at launch was pretty uninteresting (although I still ended up with all of them).

That pretty much leaves Kameo and King Kong. And neither of those allows for more than 2 players, and in Kameo, the cooperative mode is a reward for achieving levels in single player mode, and not a given right as with most other co-op games I’ve played of late.

Again, Microsoft’s proclamations during the Spring of 2005 at GDC and E3 about the Xbox 360 being a system the whole family will enjoy seem to fall flat, at least for now.

Sure, I’ve looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace and seen I can download a bunch of games, but of course, then I’d have to pay for them, and wait for the tedious downloads ("broadband" on Bonaire means “occasionally faster than a dial-up modem” - huge difference to what “broadband” is in the U.S.). And I didn’t get my Xbox 360 to play effectively 2D games with cute graphics, or slightly improved remakes of games I used to play in the arcades a couple of decades ago.

I’m hoping some game developers out there are working towards filling the multiplayer family gaming vacuum for the Xbox 360.

I’ve been so busy in the last few months that I’ve barely had time to surface, but things are thankfully slowing down. I have probably missed a few new images, but my extremely talented wife, Linda Richter just finished several new paintings.

A couple weeks ago she finished “Koi in Blue”, and this past week, a triplet of tropical frog images she has entitled “One Frog, Three Frogs. Green, Blue, and Yellow Frogs.” Take a look at them at http://www.LindaRichter.com.

Linda has also been making some very cool ornaments (which in the present season make great Christmas ornaments) featuring miniature prints of her and my work, in a small mat decorated with cinnamon sticks, sea glass, or shells. These can be found only at our Cinnamon Art Gallery on Bonaire at the moment, though.

I’m pretty sure I was the first person on the island of Bonaire to have an Xbox 360. It arrived at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, November 24th (not a holiday on Bonaire, since the island is Dutch, not American). I had ordered the high end “all inclusive” Omega pack from GameStop.com a few months back and had it shipped to my in-laws in New Hampshire. They received it on Tuesday, November 22nd and turned it right around to ship to me on Bonaire via FedEx. Not the cheapest way to go, but certainly the most efficient (other than flying it down in person).

After we had finished Thanksgiving dinner, my kids and I set the console up. I plugged it into the VGA/PC connector on my Samsung DLP display, attached the wireless adapter, turned it on and lo, it worked!

However, the set up was horribly tedious, as I decided I wanted to have the thing configured properly for Xbox Live as well. If this is Microsoft’s idea of a console for the masses, they haven’t a clue as to what the masses will put up with to, I think. My 10 year old daughter finally gave up watching me enter data via the on-screen keyboard and went to bed. My 8-year old son, bless him, was patient enough to bear witness to the completion of the set-up and even play a game with me.

One major annoyance was that I could not use an existing Passport.net account when setting up the system, and woe to anyone ordinary mortal who only has one e-mail address and an existing Xbox console that they have registered. I happen to run a web hosting provider and have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses I can use or generate, but that’s a rare thing out there.

The other annoyance was that using an on-screen virtual keyboard is a royal pain in the butt when having to fill out page after page of forms. Would have been a lot nicer to either be able to plug a PC keyboard into the box and type on that (and it may be possible to do it via the USB connectors), but no suggestion was made by the Xbox to do so. Or, alternately, allowing one to do all the data entry on a PC via a web site, and then just punching in a few codes on the Xbox 360 to finalize the set-up. But I persevered and got it done.

Of the dozen and a half games I got with the system, my son decided that we should try King Kong (I pretty much ruled out Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, Condemned, GUN, and Quake 4 as being inappropriate for him) as our first game. The graphics were pretty decent, but not awe-inspiring. I had configured the Xbox 360 for the highest resolution the DLP display would support, and it did a good job crisply filling the display (although the Samsung DLP does not show PC output as completely full screen, for some reason - there was a small black border all the way around the image).

We didn’t play for long as my son had school the next day (as my wife came to remind me at 10pm).

I stayed up and playing about a half hour each of Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, GUN, and Quake 4. Enjoyed them all in various ways. However, Microsoft’s highly touted efforts back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to make the use of the controller, and more particularly, the use of particular controls universally the same across games apparently didn’t make it to production. Everyone of the five games used different variations of buttons to fire various weapons, etc. Movement seemed to be the only thing more or less universally constant, but that tends to be the case on other consoles too.

I must say, I love the responsiveness of the new wireless controllers, and the wireless-ness is great too. But the “Charge & Play” cable idea just plain sucks. I don’t want a cable connecting my wireless controller to the Xbox 360, plus it never seems to charge the battery to the point of getting a green “I’m fully charged” light (and it doesn’t consistently charge the battery when the Xbox 360 is off). The suggestion in the documentation to use a quick charger for the rechargable battery is a good one, but no one is selling these quick chargers!

Anyhow, the next morning I got the Media Extender functionality running, but not without further hassles, like having to reinstalled aspects of Media Center Edition 2005 on my Windows MCE-based computer. The link the Xbox 360 provided for the MCE extension software for my PC did not help.

I’ll have many more comments forthcoming, but in summary from initial impressions, the Xbox 360 is not worth the high premium one presently has to pay. The graphics are good, the game play is good (for the few Xbox 360 games out there now), but the game selection is poor (especially for games kids can play), and set-up is horrific (if you want Xbox Live).

On The Richter Scale, I give the Xbox 360 a 6.5 out of 10.0.