Bush Mackel

Hey kids! The short of it is that me and my wife have a new arrival! She gave birth early this morning to a 8 pound, 9 ounce bouncing baby boy! So I think I’m probably going on a short vacation for the rest of the week in terms of the site. I’ll put a full post up about the new baby sometime soon when I can find the time! (He’s a big boy!)

It’s so funny that I happened upon this article because the wife was just “talking” to me about my pre-occupation with HD. I was saying that I’m not going to buy another DVD until I get either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and she essentially responded with, “Why bother when in a couple of years there will be something even better.” And then I see this article on IGN talking about Super Hi-Vision, a standard that’s supposed to be coming to consumer use sometime in the “near” feature, giving consumers a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 or a 16 times higher resolution than 1920 x 1080 (1080p).

Geez. I mean, will we even be able to see the difference? Any programming in 1080p looks ridiculous already! And they say it’s gonna be even better?! Check out the short article on IGN here.

Over the weekend I was at my buddy’s house and he was playing what else, Halo 2 online. I was like, “Man, …I should start playing Halo 2 again. I forgot how much fun this was!” And with newer playtypes including SWAT and more maps, Halo 2 over Live was sure to be a nice experience for me once again.

So yesterday after work, I decided to give it a whirl. I new that I would be fine as far as a Live account went because I recently just opened up a new account since my old one expired. Ok, so I start up Halo 2 go to online play, and try and get into Team Swat. But then I message comes up telling me that I’m missing some maps and need to download them first. At this point, I really just wanted to play so I try the other game modes, and apparently every one of the game types is requiring me to get these maps. *sigh* So I go to the content download section of Live (as directed by Halo 2) and see what’s up.

Turns out that there’s 4 map packs for download, 3 of the free ones I already have and the other one that I need to pay for is the one I need. Hmph. I’m thinking to myself that it’s kind of crappy that the game is requiring me to buy a map pack to play online now. But whatever. They have me over a barrel. I choose to buy the thing and it starts downloading. But wait-What’s this!? The purchase failed. Argh! And I’m sure it’s because I have gotten a new credit card since I made my Live account. But whatever. I’ll just go into account maintenance, change the credit card number and be done.

I hope it’s not this hard on the 360. Maybe what I’ll do is just block out an hour of time everyday and just try 500 numbers for the credit card number part on Live. That way this time next week I’ll be back online. *rolling eyes*

I’m trying ease back into the work week after Memorial Day. So far it’s going alright and I have softball practice to look forward to this afternoon which always proves to be a little pick me up. But hey, I was checking out on my blog today and through the little MyBlogLog sidebar widget/gagedeteroo I found starthannig’s page and consequently, this cool little Geek Quiz. Sure every couple of months there’s another one, but it’s always fun for a little diversion.

54% Geek

As memorial day approaches, I’m suddenly presented with the problem of what to do this weekend. Well, it wouldn’t really be a problem if it were up to me since I would just hang around the house, buy a 360 and play video games all weekend long. Unfortunately though, the fact remains that I’m married and the wife is with child. Furthermore, she’s going stir crzay because she can barely walk now so now she expects that we’ll go to every freakin BBQ presented to us. Now normally I’d be about that, but if you haven’t figured it out, I’m currently in a particularly lethargic mood.

So yeah, don’t expect too many posts from me this weekend because on top of being lazy, I’ve recently become addicted to Desktop Tower Defense from a post on Shoemoney. I’m slowly learning the way of the game, here’s a screenshot of my top score on Easy.

So over at Wealth Junkie, there was a post made about VZW Song ID. If you didn’t know, it’s a new app from Verizon that allows you to hold your phone up to any music you hear, and the phone is supposed to identify the song on the spot so that you can get that song as a ringtone or music file for your phone. Well, I had seen the commercials, but until I saw that post I had forgotten all about it.

1. The River – Good Charloote
2. Misery – Good Charlotte
3. Hook – Blues Traveler
4. Chasing Cars – Snow Patrol
5. Always Something There to Remind Me – Naked Eyes
6. Daughter – Pearl Jam
7. Girl – Beastie Boys
8. Lump – Presidents of the USA
9. Lullaby – Shawn Mullins
10. I Need to Know – Marc Anthony

Long story short, I tried like 20 or 30 more songs, and barely a hiccup. The only ones it had a problem with are the ones I gave it when I got frustrated and really went out of my way to try and break it by popping in a CD from the OST of the Dreamcast game, Samba de Amigo. It hit 1/3 songs there. But all in all, it performed flawlessly, nailing just about every song I put in it’s way, including songs from the 50, 60s, 70 and 90s and not just pop hits eitehr! Here are some highlights…

1. Day-O – Harry Belafonte (horrible quality)
2. Lean on Me – Bill Withers
3. Eric B is President – Eric B & Rakim
4. Da Doo Ron Ron – Crystals
5. Do You Want To – Franz Ferdinand
6. I Tried – Bone Thugs N Harmony
7. True – Spandau Ballet
8. Running Out of Time – Hot Hot Heat
9. The Entire Fantasia 2000 CD
10. Little Piece of My Heart – Janis Joplin

At the beginning of the week at work I was told that I was going to be put on a new project, working on a Chumby. At the time, I had no idea what a Chumby was, but then I checked out the website www.chumby.com and got a basic idea. After that, I took the thing home and started playing around with it (since I couldn’t use it at work because I didn’t have access to the Wireless network), and I was quite enamored with it. I think this Chumby thing is going to be huge.

It’s such a cool little PERSONABLE thing that I think is really gonna hit with the young college crowd shortly after it’s released when there’s more widgets for it. And even if you’re a tech guy living the digital lifestyle, I think you’re gonna like this because you can put it say, in your family room and again-always have an eye on the stuff you care about on the web! If it’s features stopped there, it’d be cool enough, but it also has an an accelerometer in it, a touch screen, microphone and a squeeze sensor! Now most of these features haven’t been used yet in a really beneficial way, but just knowing that they’re there…Well, that’s pretty cool.

So until they come out for consumer use sometime this summer, check out the website – www.chumby.com and see all the cool widgets that have already been developed for it and all the other cool things you can do with your Chumby!

What do you get when you take the Kombat (see the K) of Mortal Kombat the movie (which were actually not to bad), and add it to the sheer horridness of Street Fighter the Movie? Well if the trailer is any indication, Dead or Alive – The Movie.

1. No chance these weirdo over the top video game characters come off as anything other than unbelievable to movie audiences. (See Zack, a black kickboxer with a green mohawk…DeeJay who was a walking stereotype in SF the Movie is more credible)
2. Kevin Nash is in the movie
3. The first DOA was apparently released on the Sega Saturn which makes this game, (at least in extension), related to another Sega movie – House of the Dead

In my humble opinion, one of the biggest problems with SF the movie, (besides the characters being pretty untrue to their origins, E-Honda’s famous “I’m sumo brother”, Zangief’s lack of understanding when it comes to the thumbs up, and the heavy accented Jean Claude Van Damme playing Guile (an American Air Force guy) or M. Bison trying to destroy the world using a SF Coin-Op joystick), would have to be it’s lack of memorable fight scenes. I dare you to remember any good fight scene in the whole movie. (And don’t forget the movie is called Street Fighter). MK at least gave us that. And from the trailer for DOA, we might get a decent fight scene or two. But besides that,

…I’m worried.

It was said in OXM that Street Fighter the Movie was SO bad, that it literally killed Raul Julia( who played M. Bison). This movie may not have as much to live up to as SF, but I would be worried for my health if I was Jaime Pressley.

I don’t know if this ever happens to other people, but sometimes it feels like technology just all gets together to conspire against me, and it seems to always happen at once.

It started yesterday when I looked at my back account and noticed it was overdrawn. Now this isn’t my REAL bank account, but my slush fund where I keep most of the profits from webstuff and the like. So I didn’t know what was up and I had to call my bank and long story short, I found out that one of the checks I deposited a week ago or so that they cleared was being “returned”. I asked what that meant, and they said that it bounced. So now I have to go harass my client who wrote me the bad check and see what’s up. But I’m a bit ticked at this point because my bank said a couple of days ago that the check was good. Argh. Now my account is overdrawn and I’m SURE they’re going to charge me a fee.

Sometime after this, I noticed that I my phone wasn’t charging anymore, so I had to take that to the store where they said I needed a new phone. But of course, they were out of the phone I have. Which phone? The LG Chocolate. It’s like the freakin’ most popular phone out there, and they don’t have any in stock. (Ok…I guess that makes sense, but it still sucks). So they say they’ll send me another. Freakin’ A.

So I get home and I look at my Azoogle account and I see that the clicks seem really low. I go to my AdWords to see what they’re reporting on the clicks side, and shocker, big discrepency. ARGH. So I had to contact my Affiliate Manager and deal with the whole not tracking issue. Oh, and somehow my AdWords served $5-$10 more in ads than what it was supposed to yesterday, and that $5-$10 extra was already on top of a big day of spending which apparently went right down the drain. Double Argh.

After that, I setup in AdCenter account and a couple of hours later I check my mail and I have something from AdWords saying that my credit card declined my last account charge. My credit card has a limit of oh, a billion dollars so I knew it wasn’t that. Seems that AdCenter made like 6 charges on my card, 5 of them for a dollar…Which sent up a flag at my credit card and they put a hold on the account.

Does anyone else have days like this where it seems that all your tech stuff is controlled by Cyberdyne and that you’ve just been privy to the warnings of Judgement Day? Thank goodness this is a new day.

So if you all remember, on Friday or something I said that I was venturing out into Affiliate Marketing. Well besides being dragged to many a boring affair this weekend by the wife, I still managed to get myself neck deep into this strange and fantastic world. I think I’m going to post my findings soon in the next post or two, but for now know that I’ve had some VERY early (and little) success, and when trying to figure out how to get into all this, there’s a TON of SPAM out there promising to teach you everything you know. So be careful, most of the stuff promising to teach you is just people trying to make a buck off you.