A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

I'll admit I can remember Pong on a home TV. Yet, as mentioned in my eJournal and images before, most of my game playing experience occurred when friends and I ran an arcade during the summers of my college days. That was the late 1970's and early 1980's. I remember shooting at tanks from inside a virtual world of vector graphics in Atari's Battlezone. This would've been the original, stand-up cabinet where the player looked through a periscope. I knew that even thin green lines in 3-D sure seemed to beat out the coloured, but flat, images on the Pacman machines.



For years and years after that I didn't play games.

I did toy with an original xbox which is still in a closet here somewhere. We used it to play DVDs for a while and I spent a few hours impressed with Voodoo Vince.

Today, I spent most of the morning looking at trailers for the Sony PS3. This time things seem right for a fit to the Onkyo home theatre sound and the 42" Toshiba LCD. Although I'm thinking about buying one primarily for playing Blu-ray movies, if it's all connected, I will probably end up exploring a few game titles too. The Playstation 3 isn't known for having many good games at present: however, I expect the number will increase through 2008.



Yikes, we've gone beyond basic, wire frame graphics in the last 28 years, haven't we?

Labels: Bret, games, Joel, PS3, Sunapee, The Harbor Gameroom

Yesterday's entry about Blu-ray discs got me feeling a little sentimental. When I was small, we had a television antenna on a metal pole beside our house. For some reason, the Boston channels came in more clearly than when it was attached to the roof. I remember that occasionally we had to go turn it to adjust the picture. Doing so, could reduce the amount of snow. It all seems so quaint compared to today's satellite TV.

I had been to college and was working overseas during the advent of consumer video tape. Although in high school we did have a large reel-to-reel tape deck that would shoot only in black and white.

It seems to me that DVD's have been around forever, but actually we were still using VHS a few years even after coming to Canada. Standard discs seem very ubiquitous around my the apartment now. Thanks to software, I've got hundreds of copies of movies for personal use. Some humans, like crows, like to collect shiny objects, I guess. I like having instant access to great cinema even if a particular movie is seldom viewed. Here's an example:


From Director Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet (1968)

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

Labels: movies, stars, television

High definition TV is delicious. For months and months my only hint of what it really looks like is through the high-def satellite channels of Bell ExpressVu.

My up-converting DVD player can provide a picture which is marginally better than standard TV, but it sure ain't the real McCoy. I've commented with disgust on the annoying format war for true high-definition discs. This week, that battle has apparently ended with Sony's Blu-ray as the victor. The competitor, Toshiba has officially thrown in the proverbial towel. I'll settle for this scenario as long as it means an increasingly quick proliferation of mainstream HD.

The problem presently preventing widespread adoption is cost. The cheapest Blu-ray player is going for around $399 at local electronics suppliers. Many of these players are not even very future-proof as they do not provide the Net access necessary to implement BD Live (Profile 2.0). In fact just about the only safe bet if one were purchasing today would be to go with a Sony PlayStation 3. It has built in wireless and a hard drive.

For the same $399 one can have a machine with a lot more flexibility than a stand-alone Blu-ray player. Putting a Blu-ray disc in the gaming console was considered unwise and costly when the PS3 first shipped. Now however, it appears as if it was the Trojan horse that stealthily helped push Sony's HD format to victory.

I might be convinced to go purchase a new PlayStation 3 this weekend, but production has stopped on the higher end, 80 GB $499 model. I must wait until the new unit shows up as it may have 120 or 160 GB for the same price. People can only speculate on the configuration as Sony is notoriously tight-lipped about unrealeased products.

Labels: games, HDTV, Internet, PS3, television

Tax season is officially here. In Canada the main form from the employer must arrive by the end of February. It's called a T4 slip. In the past, I'd always waited until that form arrived in my mailbox before going out to buy QuickTax, the software that allows individuals to prepare their own tax returns. It's pretty straight-forward and the software helps one get the details correct. I especially like the ability to play with what/if scenarios.

I cannot remember exactly, but I'd say that I've been filing directly from my computer for at least four or five years. Actually, I really can't recall when I last drove to drop off a printed form in the Surrey office of Revenue Canada. Any owed tax or rebates are all done through electronic banking too.

This year, though, was the first time I could view my own T4 statement directly from BCIT web services. So as to be less paper dependent, and of course more environmentally friendly, I think I'll forgo purchasing the software on CD in a box this year. If I download the program, then I will help to continue the trend toward paperless taxes.

Labels: government, Internet, software

My Flickr membership runs until the end of next year. What a bargain it is! It costs me $5 a month to host this web site which allows 200 megabytes of storage, I think. Flickr costs out to a bit more than $2 per month for unlimited uploading. A single file from my Kodak can be as large as 4 megabytes. We're talking big numbers here.

Now I'm lazy though. So far I've put only ten photos from last week's cruise. In fact, I still have vacation photos from Zürich, Switzerland in the fall that I haven't gotten around to upload.

One really can take pictures of anything nowadays at near zero cost. I can compare this to when I was a kid and taking each photo had an associated price tag even when developing B&W film on the stairway. (When the door was closed it was nearly the darkest place in the house.) I took two photos from the balcony today and one yesterday. They're on Flickr now. I don't know at what point quantity becomes overload.

To see a slide show of pictures taken from the balcony over the years, click on this example picture.

Labels: balcony, Flickr, hard disk, New Westminster

I yawned this morning as teaching from 8:30 to 12:30 was a bit of a struggle. More than having to deal with tiredness, I had a hard time seeing what I was doing. I didn't realize how dependent I've become on my progressive lenses.



On the last evening of last week's Mexican cruise I broke my glasses. That was Saturday. I was in the spa area's steam room and tried to wipe off my glasses with a towel. I don't blame the towel as the last time I replaced my lenses but not the frames, so they were getting old. Three years is old for any pair of mine, I guess.

There was no way to make any fixes onboard other than trying some cellophane tape. I learned once upon a time that I should always pack an extra set of glasses on any trip. Once in Sri Lanka I was swimming in the ocean and lost a pair in an ordinary wave. I couldn't find them and ended up needing to find an optometrist and having a new set made. Not being able to see is troublesome, especially on a vacation where every thing is new. On last week's trip I didn't heed my own advice though.

I made it back to Vancouver taped up. I found several old glasses around the house but none were bifocals. I can see far away with no trouble with what I have on my face at the moment. Yet, going between normal vision and today's class texts just about drove me bananas.

Labels: cruise, glasses, Mexican cruise

It was a rather leisurely day back from Long Beach, CA. We walked off the cruise ship before 9:00 am and were home by 5:00 pm. So, we were on boat, bus, LRT, plane, bus, and SkyTrain. It was necessary to go uptown to buy vegetables just to get pickup truck on the list too.

You can expect me to upload photos and comments from the week during the upcoming one. One surprise is my usual afternoon classes were switched to the mornings. So, I will be up to see the sun rise tomorrow.

Labels: cruise, flying, Mexican cruise