Jay McGavren's Journal

Just grabbed new albums from Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, and The Prodigy, and I have to say I’m really disappointed. These people all used to be gods in my eyes: makers of the loudest, angriest, most addictive music I’ve ever heard. But on each of their latest releases, maybe one or two songs are enjoyable, a handful more are tolerable, and the rest is cliched or unlistenable crap that makes me reach for the “next track” button almost immediately. Add this to Orbital’s dismal Blue Album (reported to be their last), and it’s shaping up to be a sad year for electronic music.

Has anyone else noticed that despite the huge environments and detailed models in DOA2 Ultimate, there isn’t a single “Now Loading” screen? I haven’t looked into this, but I’m betting it’s due to caching on the hard drive. I think a hard drive is among my requirements for my next console; no way I’m going bad to optical-only media.

Oh, and here’s a few more: HDTV output standard on all games. Ethernet out of the box. Support for wireless. A cheap/free online play service like Live.

Nice-to-haves: Play MP3s, view movies and photos over the network. Online tracking of game stats a la Halo 2. Ability to trade/download save games online.

Wish list: No in-game configuration of online options/friends list/banned people. I want one standard interface handled by the console, because I don’t trust game makers to do it right.

I’ll pay whatever I have to in order to get these things, but if I don’t, I don’t think we’ll upgrade (at least not until two price drops into the product cycle). I’m quite satisfied with the XBox, thanks.

Back when I got my first Macintosh, it had no hard drive, so I had to buy a 40 MB external drive for over $100. It was bigger than a phone book. I now carry a flash drive around in my pocket with six times the capacity, and it only cost me a third of the price. Ain’t technology great?

A few important announcements...

The hot and sour soup at Flo’s Chinese is very, very good.

The dog came in from the back yard limping for no apparent reason. I of course promptly freaked out, thinking he might have a broken leg, and I was horrified the Diana and her mom were telling me to wait and see if it got better. They finally agreed to my taking him to the vet, though.

Three x-rays, 150 dollars, and two hours later, and they didn’t find anything. They sent him home with an anti-inflammatory and said to restrict his exercise. (I.e. no barelling around the house at 90 miles an hour.)

The next day he’s prancing around as if nothing ever happened. That was a waste of money. Guess the ladies were right.

Lenny is to the point where he demands one of everything in the grocery if you take him. I now hate - absolutely hate - any snack food company that makes a promotional deal with children’s television shows (Barney-shaped fruit snacks and so on).

Small freaking world...

I’m working on an idea for a media server app, and was trying to think of unique (potentially trademarkable) names for it. I thought of the server as a kind of glue which lets you access all your content via a single interface.

Hmm… “glue” is a common word - how about a unique spelling like “Gloo”? I Googled for the word to see if it was already taken:

Gloo

Aaaghh! The first hit was for a media sharing app! How scary is that?