Every morning my daughter gets up and comes to hang out in bed with me and Mommy. Usually she gets bored after a while and says "Daddy, I go watch insert name of irritating kids show here" and we get up and watch tv and eat breakfast. Yesterday she surprised me by saying "Daddy, we go play Crash Bandicoot." (She pronounces it "Cash Bandakook" which is about 1000 times cuter in person, by the way.) So we did. jsd note: Crash Twinsanity has the most stupid hard difficulty of any platformer ever. I can't believe we rated it "Medium." Thank god for the infinite lives cheat.

My little girl is almost 3 years old, and astounds me daily with the things she says. My favorite recent quote: Me: What do you want to eat? She: French toast! Me: OK, let's get it out of the fridge. (I hold up the toast). She: Oh, oh, Daddy.... It's... it's kinda square! Me: Yeah, I guess it is!

Recently Jeff Gerstmann posted a video blog complaining about the Xbox HD-DVD inability to output 1080p and why he has to learn way more about this stuff than any sane person would really want. Let me break it down for you, Jeff: In the beginning, we had analog video, and it was good. RF, composite, S-video, component, and VGA... these are all analog transmission systems. DVI was a big step up - as that nice shiny 'D' on the front might lead you to think, it is DIGITAL. No more interference, no ghosting, just razor sharp clarity. And it was good. DVI (as the nice shiny 'V' in the middle might lead you to think) only carries video. The industry got together, designed a nicer cable, made it carry both video and audio and dubbed it HDMI. Inside the HDMI cable the video side of things is exactly the same as a DVI signal. This is why you can get cheap DVI/HDMI adapters and use computer monitors with your consumer video gear now. But wait... HDMI is digital, and therefore according to the movie studios, PURE EVIL. If you could record that digital video data you'd have a perfect copy of a high def video signal. This aggression just will not stand. So they came up with a solution, called HDCP. It basically means that the digital signal is constantly being encrypted and decrypted in the path from the disk to your eyeballs. The bits on the disk are encrypted. Your HD DVD player software decrypts them, does whatever it's going to do to do them, then sends them to the video card, which encrypts them again before they get to the cable. Your TV takes the encrypted signal off the cable and decrypts it into an image you can view. Imagine what would happen if the output from the back of your PC or game console's video card was unencrypted. Why you could just grab those bits and do whatever you want with them! Unthinkable! Microsoft can't just give you an HDMI cable for the Xbox. Well, they could, but it wouldn't work, because of HDCP. They'd need to add an encryption ROM INSIDE the Xbox. Once the bits are physically out of the box and on that cable, they can't be unencrypted. You could steal them and do all sorts of wrong things. So the only way to make it happen would be to open the Xbox and modify it internally. However HDCP is not just a thing you drop in, you have to license it, and get certification, blah blah blah. Bottom line, MS will have to re-engineer the Xbox if it is to support HDMI/HDCP. Given that the game console business model is predicated around sticking with a known hardware design that drops in cost over the hardware lifespan due to cheaper parts, new efficiences in production, etc, the chances look to me to be between slim and none. 1080i over VGA is an OK compromise, but it's also sort of puzzling. VGA can do 1080p in theory, but for some reason it isn't implemented on the Xbox360. Maybe there aren't a lot of TV's that could use it so Microsoft decided it wasn't worth it. Who knows? The bottom line is that, once again, DRM makes consumers suffer. I've read stories of people who dropped $5000 on home theater PCs and TVs only to find out that their brand new graphics cards couldn't speak HDCP to their TV, leaving them to fall back to component or VGA (analog! boo hiss!) output.

We only know in theory what we are doing...

I finally got my system "quiet enough" last night, thanks to the advice of folks at Silent PC Review. I do pro audio work, so having a quiet system is essential for critical listening. I also like to play games, though, so I have a GeForce 7900 GT card. I recently upgraded my system (see blog post below) but was disappointed at the buzzy humming whine noise. My friend works for Apple and his dual G5 and dual Intel Mac towers put my rig to shame with their low noise - both of them together were quieter than the sound of my system. Thanks to advice from SPCR's articles and helpful forum posters I am happy to say that my machine is now extremely quiet. You have to stick your head pretty much on it to hear anything. Antec P180 - great looking case, good solid feel, very stylish, and good sound deadening. On its own though it wasn't enough. Zalman northbridge heatsink - I replaced the tiny 6000rpm mobo chipset fan with this heatsink. Helped a little. Zalman VF900-CU VGA cooler - THIS was the secret weapon. Once I swapped out the eVGA's stock fan for this, the noise dropped almost to nothing. I still haven't bothered to replace the AMD stock fan in fact. I use AMD Cool 'n' Quiet and the Asus Q-Fan to keep the CPU fan revs low so I imagine that helps, but even with the CPU under load I haven't noticed any appreciable increase in noise. I'd attach pics but it's just a regular P180 with some ugly wiring... the power supply leads are not long enough to route super cleanly, so there's a big knot of stuff cable-tied in the middle. PATA drives don't help the situation either. Anyway, temps are fine (I'm not a crazed overclocker so I don't need ultra-efficient cooling) and most importantly, it is QUIET.

Every 12 months or so I get hooked on pinball again. The addiction started when I was in college. Our Student Union had a very respectable arcade with the latest pinball and video games. Arcade video games didn't seem that exciting to me, as I had a state of the art Atari computer which could play some excellent games. So, it fell to pinball to provide that exciting can't-get-it-anywhere-else thrill. I was fortunate to be right in the midst of what I consider the pinball golden age. Everybody seems to have a different opinion on what that is, so it probably just depends on the years that you were playing most actively. For me that would be 1986 through 1991. The best games of that era were powered by the Williams System 11 hardware, which provided basic sampled sounds, FM synthesis for effects and music, and alphanumeric displays, which the programmers could use to do simple graphic animations if they were very clever. Games like Pin*Bot, Fire!, Cyclone and of course the almighty Funhouse came out one after another, each one with crazier themes and wilder tricks. After System 11, Williams/Bally switched to the WPC system, which featured dot matrix displays and high quality sampled speech & music. The toys and rules got ever more complex on these machines, which is unfortunately probably what ended up killing pinball as an industry in the mid 90's. The machines were increasingly expensive to own and operate, especially compared with video games. One by one companies like Williams, Sega, Data East, and Gottleib closed their pinball divisions, choosing to focus on more lucrative areas. The only company still making new pinballs is Stern. The spur for my latest round of addiction is the presence of an Indiana Jones (Williams, 1993) machine in the GameSpot employee lounge. We're amassing quite a collection of video games and other arcade machines. I think it's awesome that we are getting the machines that you can't readily enjoy at home - we've got Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, a full size two-player Time Crisis 2, air hockey, and now Indiana Jones pinball. I try to sneak in a game every day before I leave the office! Since real pinball is so much fun, and most people don't have the money or space for their own machine, the existence of video pinball simulators should come as no surprise. Unfortunately, most attempts at simulating this oh-so-physical real world phenomenon on screen have come up short. The best of the bunch for my money was the Pro Pinball series of games, put out by Empire Interactive in the mid-late 90's. The games were The Web, Timeshock!, Big Race USA and Fantastic Journey. Despite coming out in the DOS/Win95/Win98 era, they still run on Windows XP. I still play them from time to time in fact. The latter three titles are fanatical simulations of 1990's-style pinball machines. Where some developers take the stance that since it's a video game, it can do things that are impossible in the real world, the Pro Pinball series took the opposite approach: everything is completely plausible and could have been built into a real machine. The games even feature operator menus just like real machines of the era. (There are demo versions of these games at GameSpot, so try them out!) Four titles, no matter how well realized, would never appease true pinball fanatics, though. Luckily, salvation was at hand in the form of Visual Pinball and PinMAME. You've probably heard of MAME: it lets you play old arcade games on your PC through emulation of the original ROMs. As you can imagine, PinMAME does the same, except with pinball machine ROMs. By itself that's not so much fun - you can see the dot matrix display and hear some sounds, and that's about it. So Visual Pinball entered the picture - it's a full on pinball construction kit. Users have obsessively recreated almost every real pinball machine ever made with it. Combined with PinMAME, you have an on screen experience that approximates the look and sound of a real machine. Head on over to PinballSim.com and check it out. You can even download a very good replica of our Indiana Jones machine! So that's all well and good, but Visual Pinball is getting on a bit in years, there hasn't been any development on it in quite some time, and the graphics are not exactly cutting edge any more. The new contender for the throne is called Future Pinball, and it takes pinball construction to the next level. It supports modern graphics card features like antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and more. Check out their demo table for an example of the power of this new system. Being a new app, it doesn't provide enough features yet to fully emulate the mid 80's-90's tables, but I can only assume that they are coming in time. If FP is ever integrated with PinMAME, watch out!

Personally, I am totally stoked. You wouldn't believe the amount of psychosis that show has caused me over the years. The amount of prep work we have to do behind the scenes to make sure the systems can withstand the load is mind-boggling. Good riddance, I say! Now we can get on with the business of building a better site instead of throwing sandbags around the levee to keep the flood damage down.

This is just the cutest thing ever. [video=JHRgljr55bMMvzA]

my morning really sucked. first, i had to wait 10 minutes for a train. then i got off at civic center only to find that the DPW office is actually just about exactly midway between civic center and van ness. on the escalator on the way up, my shoelace got caught in the metal grill at the top so i almost got dragged to my death and/or trampled by people coming up the escalator. i pulled so hard on the lace to get it out that it ripped a nice swath of my shoe, and it squeezed the shoe so tight that i thought my foot was gonna pop. i had to unlace and relace the entire thing to get it right. so then i walked 4 blocks, with my heart pounding from the adrenaline, to the DPW office, which it turns out is in a really sketchy alley. at least the people in the office were all nice. pleasant young kids for the most part, but unfortunately with no clue about what i wanted. when i said "sidewalk encroachment permit" they looked at me like i said "reuiathrual hurhui ua th87h89h2 ahu". so they handed me off this old chinese guy who looked at all the papers for a while, made some thoughtful chewing motions, looked at them all again, looked around confused, and said, ok i'll take this to Sherry in the back for filing. i said, fine whatever. so he vanishes, and then i'm waiting for a few minutes. the same old guy comes back out and says "are you being helped, sir?" i said, "yeah, by you. you just took my stuff back there." he looks at me like i'm nuts (and i'm thinking i might be at this point). this other guy comes over and asks me what i want. i say (for the billionth time) "sidewalk encroachment permit." he says, "frank, you dummy, go get his papers, that's for permits, on the other side of the desk!" so the old guy goes off. the other guy says "yeah, i don't know where his head is at these days." jesus. so i get the papers back, go back to the permit side (it's the same counter, but there's a sign hanging on one side saying "PERMITS" and the other is "MAPS/ZONING"), and another guy comes to help me. he looks at the papers and says "i need to see a picture." i said, "why?" he says "i need to see a picture." i said "why, this paper says you need to give me a permit." he says "i need to see a picture, cuz it's gonna be notarized with all this stuff." i said "it doesn't say anything about a picture." he says "i need to see a picture." i left, empty handed.

I am no stranger to building PC's. I hate to admit but I actually love the process. Poring over badly-translated documentation, cutting your fingers on sharp metal edges, searching in vain for that last wayward screw which rolled away... I'm a junkie for it. I like getting to know the parts that power my rig personally. I like getting the in-depth knowledge of the various PC subsystems. I like agonizing for days over choosing one part or another -- should I save $10 or get another few Mhz of speed? I like the fact that if you just want to add a new video card, then you just add it, dammit. There's a glorious economy to it - you can keep upgrading and adding bits as time and money permit. There's probably parts in my current rig that have been there for 6 years or more. So last night I got home from work to find a big honking box from Newegg with a new motherboard, power supply, video card, and CPU. Manna from heaven! I popped in a Detroit electro CD, grabbed my trusty phillips head screwdriver and got to work dismantling the existing rig. First problem, I couldn't remember where all the motherboard screws were! I spent literally 15 minutes searching for the last one. Dork. With all the parts of the rig spread around me I mounted the new mobo, gazing in admiration at the sleek black lines. I chose the Asus A8N-SLI as the heart of my new system. I've been a big Asus fan for years, this being the 3rd board of theirs I've purchased. Their stuff Just Works and comes with a lot of nice features. Price is reasonable, and there was a combo deal on an Asus 500W power supply as well, so that sealed the deal. Good power is critical, as I learned the hard way earlier this year. My system became crazy unstable. It would boot up and run desktop stuff fine, but anything strenuous (music apps, games, even watching HDTV) would cause it to flake out and crash or reboot. Problem was trying to run all this high end stuff with an old 300W supply. No dice. Next up, installing the new CPU, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. A few years ago people would look at you funny for buying AMD but nowadays they are super mainstream. All the new servers we buy at GameSpot are powered by dual Opterons. I was jonesin' for some dual core action, because I often am doing CPU-intensive stuff for my music, and most of the apps are now dual-core or multi-cpu aware. The sweet spot for price seemed to be the 4200+. It's probably killer for overclocking but I don't go in for that usually as music apps don't get along well with it in general. However the new Asus motherboard has some sweet real-time overclocking stuff that I will probably give a whirl at some point. Installing the CPU was relatively straightforward. The stock AMD retail fan/heatsink combo went on without too much effort although I have no idea what you are supposed to do with that funky black plastic lever. The diagrams in the AMD installation document are completely useless. This is where a video would be KILLER. Maybe a business opportunity here? Next up I took the existing DDR400 RAM from my old setup and put that in in a dual channel config. Popped right in. No sweat. My new video card is a GeForce 7900GT 256MB from eVGA. I've run both nVidia and ATI and I just keep coming back to nVidia. Don't ask me why, I can't explain it. I just like their stuff. This was my first PCI-Express card, and there were no surprises. Slots in just the same as an AGP one pretty much. I figured the power supply should go in at this point so I could start contemplating how to route all the cables. I realized I should have got one of those supplies where you only attach as many cables as you actually need, but it was too late at that point. I forgot that there was a mounting plate on the old supply that needed to come off so that the supply would actually marry up to the case (made the same mistake last time as well - d'oh) but I figured it out quickly enough. The new supply is sleek, black, quiet, and all the cables are in black mesh sleeves. Tidy and attractive. The actual power connectors have a textured grip that makes insertion and removal MUCH easier than the old white plastic kind. The master power switch glows orange, which is convenient as it tells you at a glance if the supply is alive at all. I used to think that getting exciting about a power supply was crazy but having experienced the horrors of insufficient power first hand got me singing a different tune. On to my least favorite part - figuring out how to match the case controls to the pin blocks on the mobo. This is fiddly work as the headers are really small and invariably in a cramped corner of the case. However this is also one of the most important steps. If you get it wrong, you won't be able to turn your PC on! You connect the IDE activity light, power switch, reset button, and speaker to one small block. Next to that on an equally tiny block you connect the two front panel USB ports - and man is that horrible. On my case, the port cable terminates in 9 small black sleeves that you have to painstakingly match up with the correct pins. There are four pins per port, so why 9 sleeves? No idea, two of them are marked GROUND(1). Maddening! Anyway, after that nightmare, slotting the old hard drives back in and running the IDE cables was relatively painless. I then made sure all the power and fan connectors were done, and then it was time to actually try powering up this bad boy. To my utter astonishment, it worked perfectly first time. I couldn't believe it, but hey, I guess you have to get lucky some time. Now of course the real fun could begin: configuring the BIOS, reinstalling Windows, and actually trying out some applications. By the time I finished getting Windows on there, it was past my bedtime, but there was no way I was going to sleep without trying some high end 3d games. First up was Half Life 2 Episode One. I went straight to Options and chose 1680x1050 resolution (the native res of my widescreen flat panel monitor) with everything maxed out. The loading bar seemed to take forever... was I in for a cruel disappointment? No way. This new system smokes! My eyeballs were bleeding from the sheer gorgeousness and incredible frame rate. Holy mother of God. I tried a quick round of Unreal Tournament 2004 (older, I know, but my housemate still plays it every day and curses the uneven frame rates he gets on his top of the line Mac G5). No competition. Unfortunately I really had to get going, so I reluctantly turned the machine off and went to bed. I couldn't fall asleep, though. I was still buzzing from the high of setting up a stellar rig. Ah well, who needs sleep when you've got a new PC to play with?