theMediaman.com

No more than hours after posting my intentions,
I received encouragement naught.
Simply, “so where’s the Dec 1 Blog entry? Hmm?”
…said the kettle to the pot.

The first topic to cover isn’t my new job. I’m a couple days away from being “full time”, so I’ll cover that later this week. I won’t yet cover marital bliss. I’ve been out tonight and am not entirely sober and that’s a topic that deserves my attention.

For the moment I’ll cover something as superficial as my entertainment system. Consider this a warm-up. I’m a bit out of practise.

The new television is a 46″ Panasonic plasma screen. I was leaning towards an LCD as long as I have been looking at large screens. The biggest issue against an LCD screen was the low contrast ratio. However, the brightness (helpful in rooms that get a lot of daylight) and the quick response time were strong arguments for an LCD. The weak support on plasmas was the history of burn-in problems. However, just as LCDs have increased contrast ratios, Panasonic has gone a long way towards preventing burn-in.

The one hold-off on the choice of brand and model was that I wanted something I can hook up our laptops to. The model of Panasonic screen I was looking at had no VGA input, but as it turns out there’s a Future Shop exclusive model that includes exactly that.

With the help of Michelle’s Mazda 3, we managed to get the oversized box home. Later in the day, we picked up a new Yamaha surround sound system that we got a fantastic deal on at the same time, and I used my bachelor party gift card for Best Buy to pick up a Playstation 3.

It took me over a week to get it all fully set up, including more than one trip to Active Surplus to get cables. However, I have replaced nearly all my analog cabling with digital. Video is now carried over HDMI, and audio is transferred at the speed of light thanks to digital optical cabling. The only holdout is the Wii, but that hardware doesn’t support any digital outputs.

My biggest concern was that the new, $1800 television was sitting on a stand that has held the Clark family television since before we had a VCR. I wasn’t overly worried, since the old 27″, lead-loaded CRT weighed 75 lbs, and the new 46″ plasma only weighed five pounds more. However, the shaky feeling wouldn’t leave me and I realized that, in addition to the shaky legs on the stand, my worries about having the stand collapse and destroy a five-year-old, three hundred dollar television wasn’t as big a deal as if it collapsed with over $2000 of components on the stand.

So Simone and I headed off to the Etobicoke IKEA early on a Saturday morning and hit the as-is section. We found exactly what I was hoping for, in a brown-black shelf that was severely scuffed up. A Sharpie pen was able to hide the most obvious problems, and now we have a table capable of handling the television, the receiver, the PS3 and the Wii.

Ever since my Murdoch project, where I built a computer dedicated to playing back video files downloaded from the internet on my television instead of my 14″ computer monitor, this is exactly what I have been working towards. My desktop downloads television shows I can’t get without expensive cable, I copy them to the Windows Home Server and they are streamed in real time and played back by the Playstation 3 on my 46″ television.

Right now we’re watching the X-files season 6 cliffhanger where Scully finds the UFO buried on a beach in Africa. Since season 5, they’ve been shot in 16:9. Right now I’m seeing episodes of X-Files as even many of the most X-Philes of us have never seen before.

It’s very sweet!

Well, I’m back up for air following over one full month of late nights, weekend hours, and two overnights at work. It feels like every moment outside work has been filled with wedding plans. Aside from the business surrounding my 32nd birthday and sleep, I really haven’t had an hour to do anything but work or plan.

After three days off from work, I managed to catch up on (almost) all the personal To-Do’s outside of work and the wedding. It feels really good to be nearly caught up.  I even managed to set aside some time to beat Guitar Hero III on medium, and get a few stages further in Mario Galaxy. Yes, part of my personal To-Do list was to chill out and play video games. I still have WipEout Pulse, God of War, Darkstalkers and Ratchet & Clank on my PSP to start-and-finish.

As for the wedding, the venue’s been picked and the date is set - September 14, 2008. Following a successful weekend, the band and bridesmaid dresses have even been secured. I need to get moving on the tux’s now.

First, we have to meet with a photographer/videographer studio.  Simone’s the expert in photography, and I’m the video guy, so we decided to split up those duties. However, our first choice for video and a top-three for photography is the same place. Hopefully we can spin enough of a good package deal to justify the cost.

We sat down with all the paraphenalia from the Wedding Show we went to at the top of the year, and systematically went through each website to watch the demo reels. Some ranged from Woodbridgian, MTV-generation, seizure-inducing music videos to sappy documentaries featuring the bride and/or groom doing a voiceover of “why I love him/her so much tee hee”.  I’m serious. An uncomfortably large number of video houses fit into one of these two classifications.

The one we’ll be going to visit tonight is so damned good, our eyes were damp following the first demo reel. That’s a pretty emotional response considering we didn’t even know the couple in the video!

Simone will be taking the TTC up here in order to visit this company. The car’s battery is dead, and I’m worried that the car is going to go into another long stretch of expensive repairs. I’ve already spent over a thousand bucks on it in the last few months, but a new car will cost several thousand a year.

Hopefully I can pick up one of those sleek 2009 Matrix’s (Matricies?) from this year’s Tim Horton’s Roll Up The Rim To Please Play Again.

Last night Simone and Mini-Ben pulled me out to play dodgeball.  It’s a Toronto Parks & Rec thing, so it takes place in a public school gymnasium.  The freshly mopped bathroom reaked of urine and there was discarded food containers in the corners of the hallway. Basically, it looked how you’d expect a Toronto public school to look if CityTV’s exposés are to be believed.

After only a few matches, those parts of my lungs that haven’t seen much use since I cancelled my gym membership started loosening up and reminded me that I treat my body with the same care as a smoker. By the end of the night, my legs were moving a little slow (sort of like when you click on a link and two seconds later the page actually responds).

My lungs are heathy and pink enough that they were able to handle the workout, but my thighs took the worst of it.  They’re muscles that I never use unless climbing stairs or, apparently, dodging balls. So I’ve been feeling fine most of today until I start climbing stairs and the underworked muscles come back to haunt me.

Sadly, even being lazy hurts. Rather than playing tennis, baseball, boxing or even a light game of bowling, Simone and I have bought a Wii (and justified the purchase as an engagement gift to ourselves). The first night we had it, Simone brought some work home with her and did that while I hit home runs and bowled turkeys. It was a full two hours before she took over the controller.  During that time I didn’t necessarily play vigourously, but I did have my right arm up and swinging for the entire stretch.

The next two days were full of stress and pain in every muscle in my arm. From the bicep to the balancing muscles and my fingers holding the controller, everything was sore. It seems that the “Revolution” of new controllers simply exchange the malady of Nintendo Thumb with Wii Arm.

The whole thing was agrivated by whipping around dodgeballs last night.  However, I’m worried my right arm is going to become much stronger than the left. Thinking of ways to overcome this, I’m considering playing Super Mario Galaxy with my right hand, but committing to Wii Sports as a southpaw.

Another alternative is to play a lot of Wii Boxing (the only game I have so far that give equal time to the right-hand controller and the left-hand ‘nunchuck’). While this alone doesn’t burn a lot of calories, I figure a couple wrist-weights might increase the effort, and the challenge of the game.

Also coming soon is a game called WiiFit.  It looks like most of the ’games’ are Yoga or fitness style, but there looks to be at least a few high-intensity activities like pushups. A study (admittingly funded by Nintendo UK’s own marketing team) found a difference in calories burned between a session of gaming on the Wii and a sit-down racing game on an Xbox360. But “156% more energy burned” than sitting on your ass and watching TV is like multiplying 156 x 0.

And any game that Miyamoto is excited about, I’m excited about.  For those who don’t know video games, it’s like hearing that Spielberg is particularly excited about a movie, or Barry Bonds is excited about a new brand of steroid.

I wonder what the Wii equivalent of steroids is.  Ideas?

I abhore Wii-As-Penis jokes for the same reason most people do, it’s too damned easy.  Maybe that’s the strategy that Nintendo was going for.

In any case, Nintendo’s solution to the flying controller problem that has plagued the new console is to supply a rubber that fits nicely over the controller.  It’s even more phallic shaped in case you’re one of the seven people who missed the Wii-As-Penis jokes.

Credit where credit is due… you can order up to four of them for free when you supply the serial number for your console.

Perhaps this is a subconcious Safe Sex promotion.  “Wrap Your Wii”.

The current generation of consoles could not be more different, yet if I were to buy one, I’m not sure which I would get.

I have been to two parties involving Nintendo’s Wii… one was actually centered around the idea of people playing Wii…

…sidetrack - the phallic jokes are far too easy so I won’t bother injecting one on purpose.  Most likely it will happen by accident, or you can read double entendres into  previous or following Wii-related passages…

There are single-player games for the Wii, but that’s like playing T-ball by yourself; you don’t get quality time with your friends and it’s not a real game anyway.

The games are also a little cutsy since Nintendo aims for the family-friendly market.  Aside from a Resident Evil port, the only “grown-up” game Nintendo’s had in ten years was the Conkers game with is still cartoon-based. As I’ve said many times before, sometimes I come home from work and I want to blow the shit out of some fucking cacodemons! I don’t want to think, I don’t want to solve puzzles, I don’t want to be clever, I just want some gore.

The PS3 has a number of advantages, and the list doubles when you own a PSP like I do. One cool here-or-coming-soon feature is the ability to turn on the PS3 from your PSP anywhere on the Internet, watch TV or a Blu-ray movie, or play a game. It’s also better than the Xbox 360 when it comes to functioning as a full home theater.

The list of kick-ass games is far more limited, especially if you’re not into RPGs.  However, it would be interesting to compare the list of games 1 year after the Xbox360 came out to where the PS3 list sits now. The PS3 is the most expensive of the bunch, and even when the 40 GB version comes out this month it will cost $400. When 500 GB OEM hard drives are retailing for under $120, there’s no reason there should be a 40 GB drive in anything but an iPod.

I’m not a gamer, but I like playing video games. The wider scope of Home Theatre capabilities is what appeals to me most about the PS3, just like the PSP appealed to me more than the Nintendo DS primarily because I could watch videos and surf the Internet on it.

If I played games more, then the 360 is probably the way I would go.  As far as cost, it sits between the bargain-basement, non-HD-enabled Wii, and the holy-shit-that’s-too-much-power Playstation 3. The 360 has the best selection of current games, but it would have been better with more backwards compatibility.  Both the PS3 and 360 suffer from “supporting the most popular games (but by no means all) from the previous generation console”. Hell, even the Wii plays all GameCube games even though it uses a different size and format of disc.

JoB bought a Halo 3 Special Edition console yesterday. It’s barf-green in colour, but it comes with a wireless earring headset, uses the second-generation chips and heatsinks (the first generation had overheating issues), and spins gold from straw or something like that. In any case, that brings the number of my friends who own this console to four.

In the 8-bit Nintendo generation, the more friends who had a console, the less you needed to get one too… unless you’re more of a peer-pressure person than a leech. Now, with more friends (and a bend-over-and-pull-out-your-credit-card $50 annual subscription fee to Xbox Live), you can play against, or side-by-side with your friends through the games. 

When I took Tuesday off to play Halo 3 - yes I was one of ‘those people’ - JoeE and I played at his place, while two of his friends helped us through the campaign (story-mode) from two other houses. So now that I have four friends with 360s (only one with a Wii and none with a PS3), the gamer in me would want a 360.

Mind you, everyone likes playing together with a multiplayer Wii… (dammit).

I’m still no closer to figuring out which one I would want. After spending $600 plus taxes, I could get a “crappy” PC that would run circles around my current 2002 relic. Playing games on that would compensate for not having a console. So that’s a fourth option.

The fifth option would be to stick with my PSP and have a few beers while driving race sims. $300-600 is a lot to spend on a pasttime, especially since I don’t even have an HDTV… or $300-600 for that matter.

Three consoles, very different, yet I’m still so conflicted. At least I’m not the only one.