Ranting Canuck : Just another blog by a Canadian.

Inexpensive offsite backup

A client of mine told of me of this service Mozy, it offers online targeted towards small and medium business and home users. For $4.99 per month you get unlimited online back up and a backup agent to perform the incremental backups.

I personally think this is a great product and I am recommending that everyone should subscribe to it. One of the common issues I run in with home users and for that matter business is that they do not really have a good backup of their data. This is especially the case with home users who never think of doing it generally until it is too late. Clients who have had a hard drive fail and lost data will sometimes have a backup solution but over time they generally forgot about it.

The most common backup solution you see in the home is people backup to an external hard drive or to an optical disk. Which is all well in good but what happens your house is hit lightning? You will loose both your computer and the external hard drive, so both your primary data store and backup. I am not a big fan of using optical disks as a backup medium due to the fact the disks degrade over time making incremental not a great solution.

Another worse case scenario that an external drive or optical drive generally does not protect you against is your house burning down. A lot of people would say that if their house burned down the least of their problems would be the data on their computer. However in many cases this is extremely short sighted, I have a lot of financial information, scanned in pictures etc.

A couple of years ago I scanned in my families’ photographs, over 5000 pictures in total. If my house burnt down I would loose the originals, which would be a shame but I have digital copies of them.

For $4.99 a month, the cost of drink at Starbucks you can protect yourself loosing your data in the case of fire. Also for this monthly fee you receive a backup agent that is fully automated. You just select the data that you want backup and the agent runs when your computer is idle and does increment backup. So you don’t need to worry about changing disks or your external disk getting full.

So right now my backup solution at home is, I have backup everything to an internal IDE hard drive in my primary computer. I also write the data to the small mirrored network attached storage device (NAS) and I am not running Mozyhome to get an offsite backup.

I have been using Mozyhome and I have no issues I have done a couple of test restores also with no issue. Your data is encrypted as you upload it so you do not worry about your privacy been compromised.

Anyway this is a great product that I would recommend to anyway.

New Member of the Family

Heather has wanted us to get a dog for a long time, I fully know one of the reasons is to train me to have children. I have always been very reluctant to get a dog since we are not home that much and did not want to deal with training issues.

About a month ago Heather got me to got the Kitchener / Waterloo Humane society with her to see what they had up for adoption. I am not a big fan of going to humane society since I feel sorry for the animals there. Anyway we went, there was a cat that hated me, it would hiss at me every time I walked nears its cage, but seemed to like Heather.

Anyway we got the dogs and one little dog really stood out it was just really cute, did not really look like a dog. After thinking about it I decided we would take it out for a walk and see if she liked us, I was hoping she would not. But she really like Heather and I, we later found out she had been dropped off at the Humane Society because her owners where moving and could not take her with them. We later found out that there was a second dog from the house up for adoption also.

Heather did not like the idea of splitting up the pair so we took him out also, he was Jack Russell Terrier cross and acted like one. Was extremely hyper and was attacking other dogs and the two dogs did not seem to really like each other.

So we decided we would just adopt Coco, the name she came with, who is a five year female cross between the Jack Russell Terrier and a Chihuahua. The nice thing about getting a dog is that she was house broken to be honest we have not really had any issues with her.

She now has the run of the house when Heather and I are at work and it nice to have someone excited to see you when you come home.

One things is very clear that she is Heather’s dog, if we are both home she pretty much ignores me, while she follows Heather around.

Coco

2008 05 07 Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Nissan Rogue SL

A little over two months ago I purchased a Nissan Rogue SL All Wheel Drive (AWD) with leather and tech package. So basically this is a fully loader Nissan Rogue there is really no features that it is missing. I have put off writing up an article on the truck for a couple of reasons. The first being I want to make sure I had driven the car enough make a really educated review and also I wanted to have some pictures in the review where it was clean and not covered in snow.

This week I was finally able to get some decent pictures of my Rogue, see below and I am almost at eight thousand KM driven. The Rogue is a cross over vehicle meaning basically it is a cross between a car and an SUV / Truck. So it looks like a large car or a really small SUV. It main competition in the market is the Toyota RAV 4 and Honda CRV. The Nissan Rogue basically looks like a mini Nissan Murano which basically what it is.

As I have mentioned in previous posts I did test drive a lot of different cars before I settled on the Rogue. The main reason for this when I purchased my previous car, a Mazda 3 GT Sedan I did not test drive many other cards. I drove the Mazda 3 and I liked and ordered one. I felt that maybe if I drove more cars especially in the winter I maybe would have passed on the Mazda 3 and gone with a car I was more happier with.

Anyway I choose the Rogue over its main competitors the Honda CRV and Toyota Rav4 for several reasons. I liked the CRV but I felt it was little too plain, it was not flashy like the rogue is. I did like the Toyota Rav4 a lot when I drove it but again the Nissan Rogue was better looking and it was also significantly more then the Nissan Rogue was. Also at the time Toyota had comparatively high interest rates n the Rav4, something like six percent compared to Nissan’s three percent. Another reason I choose the Rogue was Heather was the most comfortable driving it of really all the cars that I drove, which is important I guess.

So as I mentioned I have put almost eight thousand kilometers on my Rogue and I am still loving the car. I picked it up in February so I had for some very significant snow storms. The Rogue performed great in the harsh winter what we had this year in south western Ontario. The all wheel drive kicked in as needed and I felt safe at all times, if I still my Mazda 3 I would have missed a lot meetings this year because it was horrible in the snow.

My Nissan Rogue SL has a 4 liter engine in it, but it still has guts and the power to get you out of trouble when you need it. The Rogue has a CVT transmission which gives it an extremely smooth ride, rather then a traditional transmission where you can feel the gears changing. The CVT and the smaller engine give the Rogue some pretty amazing fuel economy. It has a 60 liter tank and I am averaging about 600 – 650 KM per tank with that being am mix of city and highway driving. The second week I had the rogue I had to take to go on a longer trip, all freeway and I got closer to 800 KM on that tank of gas. This is in comparison to my Mazda 3 GT that I use to get 400 KM on a 50 liter tank.
One of the features that I wanted in my next car was a blue tooth package, I make a lot of client calls when I am driving and the police in Ontario are getting more and more militant about people using cell phones while driving. So I got the tech package in my Rogue and the blue tooth package works flawlessly. I have had several people comment that I actually sound better when I have them on hands free and driving then when I am using my Blackberry 8300 normally. The tech package also comes with XM satellite radio, which to be honest I have not used and probably I never will. I just don’t see the need for it, but I had to take it if wanted the blue tooth package.

My Rogue is black and I think it looks pretty flashy I have had a lot of people comment on the looks of the car. I did tint the drives and passengers windows, why the rear windows are tinted and front are not I am not sure. I also got the package which is black with red dots on it. The picture of this leather in the brochure does not do in justice, it really does look smart. I am finding that Rogue has a lot of usable cargo space or at least more then enough for me. My Mazda 3 had a large truck but it was odd shaped so much of it was not accessible.

I really do like my Rogue but there are some things that are annoying me. The first is that it does have a large blind spot which is fine if you know it is there. But if you do not know about it cars and even medium trucks can disappear into it. This is something they should look at fixing in later models.

My other major annoyance with the car is the small trip computer, it is small round display between the tachometer and speedometer. There is a lot room on the center dash board where they could have put a larger display. This is lack of a larger display also means that there is no navigation option for the Rogue in Canada. Not a big deal for me, I would never pay what most manufacturers want for a build in unit but it would be nice feature.

This leads me to a general annoyance about the auto industry in general. You can often get features on cars slated for American market but you can not get them for the Canadian market. For example in the states you can get Zeon head lights on the Rogue but not in Canada, why?

I have been extremely happy with my purchased of my fully load Nissan Rogue SL, there have been just some minor issues that I have run into. The fact that I like the Rogue says a lot about the handling. Historically I hated driving large cars and SUV’s they feel like you are driving a boat. But the Rogue really does feel and drive like a normal car but larger and more powerful like an SUV while still remain excellent fuel economy. I would strongly recommend anyone looking for a new vehicle at least drive the Rogue, you will not regret it.

Nissan Rogue SL

More Pictures Below

2008 04 26 Blogroll
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Mass Effect

Last weekend I finished Mass Effect on my Xbox 360, again another pretty good game. It took me about 23 hours to complete it, although if I just did the core quest I am pretty sure it could be completed in fewer than ten but more on this later.

Mass Effect was produced by Bioware, this is the same company who did the Baulders Gate series of games. I finished the game as a soldier although there is about six or seven different class’s that you can be. The solder seemed to be the straightest forward so that was the class I choose.

The graphics in Mass Effect are pretty good and the game does support 1080P so it does look amazing. The sound is also pretty good, with the weapons sounding really good. I have three main complaints about Mass Effect, well two complaints and one comment.

Mass Effect

The first is that the core quest is really short again maybe 10 hours, but I think that is stretching it. There is a lot of is side quests but they are pointless unless you wanting gaming points. You do not really get any special equipment from doing them and they are extremely repetitive. Most of the side quests involve go to planet X and kill XYZ in the same building as the previous 15 side quests. They clearly did not spend any time on the side quest, I swear they just wrote a random quest generator or something. The main quest has a lot of thought to it with different locations and dialogue.

While the side quests are annoying the load screens or sorry the elevator rides almost ruined the game for me, I am sure they did for some people. Rather then doing loading screens in Mass Effect you take very long elevator rides, which seem to take for ever. It gets really annoying when you have to go the top floor of level to do something and then go all the way back to the bottom taking several elevator rides.

There is technical reason for all the elevator rides and that is that game does not load anything onto the Xbox 360. Everything is read off the disk and loaded into memory and this just takes time. I have an Xbox 360 Elite so I have a large hard drive, I would have liked them to use this hard drive and load some of game files on to the hard drive or at least give me the option to do so. If they did this the game would have been much more enjoyable, early on I actually fall asleep during one of the longer rides.

My last complaint but really more a comment is that the controls in Mass Effect are pretty good and tight with one exception the driving parts in the M35 Mako. Most of the game is spent on foot but there is a significant time where you are driving the M35 Mako and the controls in this section of the games are horrible. What makes it worse you have to fight enemies using it. The controls work and the driving areas of the game are playable but the controls are very loose. It is also humorous the capabilities of the Mako it can drive up almost vertical walls roll down mountains and not get damaged.

Despite the couple of short coming in Mass Effect I would suggest that anyone who likes RPG’s should give Mass Effect a try. If you can tolerate the loading screens, I mean Elevator rides you will really enjoy this game. I am considering playing through the game again on a higher skill level which is uncommon for me. I never replay RPG games, but this game was fun enough and well the main quest is short enough that I am considering.

2008 04 11 Blogroll
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Gears of War

Last weekend I finished Gears of War on my Xbox 360, this was the first games that I completed on Xbox 360. This was also the first action game that I had played on the Xbox 360, before this I had just played Mass Effect and Guitar Hero 3.

Gears of war

Anyway I really enjoyed Gears of War, it was the first first shooter game that I had played in a while that I actually enjoyed. I generally tend to play for strategy and RPG games rather then shoots or twitch games. After I got us to the controls which took a couple of hours, I have played major shooters but always on the PC. So I am very much use to the keyboard and mouse rather using a controller. This was made worse since I was still getting use to the Xbox 360 controller at the time.

The graphics in Gears of War are pretty amazing and so is the sound. The controls are pretty smooth for the most part; there was a couple of time that I ran into the some clipping issues.

Oddly enough my main complaint about Gears of War is actually not the game play but rather the complete lack of story. The game starts out with you being sprung from prison by your army buddies and after a short tutorial you go straight into the action. You never really find out where the Locust Horde, the bag guys in the games come from. You get some short video clips of the world being destroyed during “emergency day” but that is about it.

Even in the manual there is no real letting of what happened and where the enemy game from. Is this a big deal in the overall game? No it is not but still it would have been nice to add to the feel of the game.

Some other little oddities that I noticed in the game is you have futuristic weapons and armor and yet you still throw your hang grenades. Yes it is very well done how your throw grenades, probably the best I have seen in a game, but still a grenade launcher would have made sense. There is also times when things happened that really do not make any sense. The most glaring is one of the final levels when you are on a train fighting your towards the front of the train. When sudden a berserker appears behind you that you to deal with? Where did it come from, apparently it materialized out of thing air. Again not a big deal but it is annoying when the rest of the game they are careful in making appear in reasonable and logical places.

Gears of War is one of the first cover first person shooters. Meaning that unlike games like Doom or Quake where you run into a room and shot enemies. In gears you have to take cover behind things and return fire. This is a more realistic to real life and is a nice change of pace. Gears of War is also the first FPS (first person shooter) where you do not have a life gauge. Instead as you take damage a symbol appears in the middle of the screen and if you take cover your regain health. It is different then the traditional life gauge but it does make the game a lot easier.

Gears of War also has a lot of online content that to be honest for the most part I will never use. I do not enjoy getting my butt handed to me by a 13 year who plays the game eight hours a day. But it does have co-op mode that allows you play the single player game with a friend. This is extremely fun and I will plan on playing the game through again on all skill levels. To get the game points and also but the game is just fun especially when you playing with a friend.

All in all I really enjoyed Gears of War and I am looking forward to the squeal that is in production. The Fact that I am planning on playing through the game again really is a testament to how good a game this is. It is extremely rare for me to replay a game let along a first person shooter.

2008 04 05 Blogroll
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Xbox 360 media Extender vs. Microsoft Windows Vista

I will come out and say I really do not like Windows Vista, but I was using it on my main home computer but I realize that unless Microsoft corrects the errors in the ways it is the future. Despite what the Apple fanboy’s would have you believe there will not be a mass migration to the Mac platform, the cost of the human engineering would be too expensive. I think even the most die hard Linux geek has accepted the fact their will never be a successful Linux release for the desktop.

I had my share of problems with Vista, there was the odd weird crash and remoting into my computer at times caused issues. But I was accepting the fact the

Vista is not all the great but getting use to the many flaws that it had.

However, this week I trying to get my new Xbox 360 to stream media broke the camels back. I could not get it to work period; I spent three hours trying to get to work myself with zero luck. I could stream files from Heather’s computer that is running Windows XP with no problem, but not my fancy system running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate edition, or as I call Windows Vista Pirate Edition. I call it this because if you are going to both to pirate vista guess what you are going to pirate the ultimate edition since it has all the bells and whistles.

Anyway I finally broke down and called Microsoft tech support to get this working, this was one of the main reasons I wanted an Xbox 360. I was on the phone with tech support for two and half hours and they tried everything under the sun. Restarting services, changing registry entries you name we tried. Finally when I mentioned that I was able to get XP to share just fine the Microsoft tech said and I quote: “Windows XP is much better and easier to setup then

Vista for streaming media.” I did everything I could do to stop laughing, one of the features they put into

Vista was the ability to stream video. Yet good old XP where this ability was tacked on in Media Player 11 is better at it!

Anyway the Tech gave up and had told me he would have a one of his supervisors give me a call in a couple of days. Well I was not waiting a couple of days as soon as I got off the phone I started a backup of my important files and I blew away my Vista install. Spending five hours to try to get something this simple working just threw me over the edge when it came to supporting

Vista. The fact that Microsoft basically told me that

Vista stunk did not help matters, I wish I had recorded that comment it was golden.

After six hours my computer is back up and running, with Windows XP installed on it. As expected I had not issues getting video and music stream from my computer to my Xbox 360.

2008 03 27 Blogroll
Geek
Rants
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Linksys WET54G Ethernet Bridge and Microsoft Xbox 360

As I mentioned in a previous post for my birthday Heather got me an Xbox 360 and one of the neat features of the Xbox 360 is that it can connect to the internet. This allows you to download game content, games, demo, movies and patches. Also by connecting the Xbox 360 to your network you are stream video and music from the other computers attached to you network.

The one trick with the Xbox is that unlike the Nintendo Wii that has a built in wireless network adapter the Xbox only comes with a standard wired NIC. You can purchase a separate wireless adapter for it but at almost $200.00, I thought that was a little expensive. So not wanting to purchase the wireless adapter I decided I would just drill a hole in the floor and run a CAT 6 network cable to the switch on my desk in the basement. This mistake I made was mentioning this to Heather, she was less then excited about me drilling a hole in the floor. Personally I always prefer to run the copper if I am able to, I also end up having issues when I attempt to go wireless.

So now not wanting to purchase the Xbox 360 Wireless Networking Adapter and having being threatened if I drilled a hole in the floor I turned to option C, a wireless network bridge. Basically a network bridge allows you to connect two types of networks that normally are incompatible to each other, they act as bridge between the networks, hence there name. So in this case I wanted to take my Xbox 360 that had a wired NIC and connect it to my wireless network.

The only wireless bridge that I was able to find that was reasonability priced was the Linksys WET54G wireless bridge. So I ordered one in and all in I have been extremely happy with it. The WET54G was pretty easy to setup after I read the manual and found out how to directly connect to it, skipping over the easy setup wizard that did not work.

To configure the Linksys WET54G you first connect to it using a standard computer using its network port. It ships with a CD that contacts a small Java application that is supposed to make configuration of the unit painless. The trick is if you are using encryption on your network it will not work. The reason why it will not work is that in the application you select the type of encryption that you are using and then it generates the pass phrase or encryption key. Which is fine except it does not know which keys are needed for it to connect to your existing network and you are not changing the keys that it generates in the application. So basically if you are just using the quick start program and you have an encrypted wireless network, which you should, you will not get this bridge to work.

So after some swearing I read the manual and found out how to connect to the device directly. I was then able to enter in the keys that where needed for it to connect to my secure wireless network. So after you have it connected to your network all I had to do was plug in my Xbox to the Linksys WET54g and it was received an IP and was able to connect to the internet. I found I am getting really good speeds well over my 7 megabyte internet connection.

With the exception of the broken quick start application I am extremely happy with the Linksys WETG54g. It is easy to use and was about half the price of the Microsoft Wireless adapter. The WET54g is also much more useful then the Microsoft Adapter since I could redeploy it if need be in the future.

2008 03 24 Blogroll
Tech
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Xbox 360 Elite

This year for my birthday Heather got me an Xbox 360 and Turok. I had mentioned that I had wanted an Xbox 360 for a couple of months, that main reason being that I have a lot of friends who have them so playing online would be nice. Also there are just more games on the Xbox 360 that are appealing to me then was on the on the Nintendo Wii that she had gotten me before. I also wanted the Xbox 360 to stream media, more on this later but this ended up being a pain to setup.

Most of the games on the WII are very family friendly and are geared towards younger players. I just was not all the interested in them to play single player, although for party games I still feel the WII is the best console.

So anyway Heather got me an Xbox 360 Elite, I had wanted the Elite because it was the best value of the Xbox bundles. It comes with the larger hard drive and also the HDMI cable and wireless controller. The wireless controller was a must just due to the layout of our living room.

Hooking up the Xbox 360 was extremely easy I have it connected to my TV with the HMDI cables so it looks amazing. The next day I went out and purchased Guitar Hero III with the wireless guitar. Again the wireless controller was a must due to how far our couches are from the Xbox.

I burrowed some games off of friend but the only games I have played so fare are Guitar Hero III and Mass Effect, I have not touched the game that Heather got me yet, Turok. To be honest Heather is hogging the Xbox she absolutely loves Guitar hero and to be honest she is really good at it, much better then I am. I get about 40k on most songs, where Heather is averaging closer to 100k most songs on her first attempt. We have both completed the game on easy and Heather is about three quarters the way through the game on medium.

Right now may only compliant about the Xbox 360 is that the fans in are really loud, I hear them a significant distance away from. I know the Xbox 360 has historically had some cooling issues but how loudness the fans are rather shocking.

Microsoft does appear to have gotten the online capabilities of the Xbox 360 right; it connects very easily to the internet. Although I do find it annoying that when I log into my Xbox 360 it disconnects me from my MSN messenger, not a big deal but annoying none the less.

Below is my gamer card, I can see Heather really getting addicted trying to get more points. Thank you Heather for the great Birthday present.

2008 03 22 Blogroll
Gaming
Heather
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BlackBerry 8130 Curve

About two weeks a lot of finally was able to do away with the Blackberry 8700 that I have been carrying for a couple of months. As I mentioned before, we were looking at moving to Telus for our provider but with the purchase of Orbex by Compugen we were staying with Rogers.

One of the main reasons I was not all the excited about us moving to Telus was that they did not have the 8130 Curve. I really wanted a curve because it a camera in it; I know the camera is only 2 mega pixels. But the main reason I wanted the camera is because I use to carry a camera in my notebook bag so when I was a client’s site I could take pictures of their environment. This allowed me to take little less copious notes when I was at a client and instead could focus on talking to the client.

Anyway about two weeks ago my new Blackberry 8130 curve came in and I am really impressed with it. This is the third black berry the first being a Blackberry 7290 then more recently the 8700, so I have been able to see how Research in Motions (RIM) devices have improved over the last three years. Comparing the 8130 to the 7290 is like comparing a Pentium 4 computer to a 286. The 8130 is must faster than the 8700 and 7290 in opening emails and attachments. There is so many more features on the 8130 then you could get on previous models.

Blackberry 8130 Curve

The main features I like about my new Blackberry is that is has the built in camera as I already mentioned. It also has a built in media player that allows you to play audio and video files. This is a really nice feature for me since we have a 3-com VOIP solution at the office and I have all my voice mails emailed to me. So I can now listen to them on my mobile device, which is really handy since I am not in the office all that much.

The 8130 curve also has comes with the GPS capability which works pretty well. I don’t really use it since I have a navigation system in my Nissan Rogue, more on the new truck later. But if I did not have the navigation system I could see this being a useful device.

From a usability standpoint the main difference between the 8130 and the previous devices that I have used is that the 8130 has a scroll ball in below the screen. My 7290 and 8700 blackberries both had scroll wheels on the side of the device so it took some getting used to the scroll ball on my device. It maybe took me two days get use to it, I know some users really don’t like the scroll ball they much prefer the scroll wheels on the older devices. Once I got use to the ball I found it just as easy to use as the wheel was and it gives you ability to scroll diagonally which is handy.

The only thing I do not like about the 8130 is that it does not feel a durable as my previous Blackberries. It is not as thick and does not have the weight, I am sure it is durable enough but I am also pretty tough on my technology. I known for dropping and tossing my previous units, so time will tell if the Blackberry 8130 Curve will be able to stand up to this abuse.

2008 03 16 Blogroll
Tech
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Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War II

Since I finished Fire Emblem I have been looking for another game on my Wii that would capture my attention. Last night I tried Blazing Angels: Squadron’s of World War II.

Blazing Angels is a light flight simulator, meaning it plays more like an arcade game then a true flight simulator. The game is not a realistic flight simulator by any means, which personally I like. I don’t have the time or really focus to become a pilot just to play a game.

Blazing Angels Xbox 360 Cover

Anyway I really wanted to like Blazing Angels but it just annoyed me. The biggest annoyance is that that the enemy air craft are so much more maneuverable there you are and does things that are impossible. The second mission of the game has you flying a fighter trying to shoot down German bombers, well the bombers where able to fly circles around me. This is aggravated by the fact that the controls are a little off; you change your pitch and roll by tilting and moving the nun chuck. So I did notice that the controls in Blazing Angel’s on the Wii seems just off.

It really reminded me of playing X-Wing or Tie Fighter on the PC with a mouse rather then a joystick. Yes you could do it but it just made the games exponentially more difficult.

There are other options that move the controls around a bit, including a couple of options that have you using the Wii Remote by holding it sideways. The different options are a nice touch, but in all modes, the motion sensing is never responsive enough. Instead, everything feels a little too floaty.

Blazing Angels suffers from some serious frame rate problems and some ugly-looking ground targets. The game feels unstable in spots, and the jerky nature of the frame rate can be, at times, a little vomit-inducing. The whole game has a grainy look to it, so objects in the distance are hard to make out. If you squint, the game looks OK, but overall, it does get ugly at times.

So all in all I would not recommend Blazing Angels; Squadrons of World War II on the WII. The controls are really not up to snuff and I found the game to be little too unrealistic.

2008 03 12 Blogroll
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Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

Tonight I finished the first game I have ever finished on the Wii, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. To be honest this was probably the first game that I really enjoyed on the Wii.

Fire Emblem is a Tactical Role player game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. Apparently is it the tenth game in the Fire Emblem series but it was first I have played or heard of. The game play is very similar to some older games that I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics.

Fire Emblem game play is little different in that the core of the game is a turn based strategy game with fantasy characters. Between the battles there is a story element and generally a character building element where you can buy and sell items upgrade units.

The game is pretty long it took me about 40 hours to complete, there are 42 chapters or mission in the game divided up into 4 chapters. The plot is pretty simple but very involved and long at times, to be honest I skipped a lot of the plot elements because they dragged too much.

Reading some reviews of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn the common complaint about the game is that it is too difficult. Well I agree the game does have a steep learning curve after you get over that it is pretty straight forward. The game would not easy nor was it impossibly hard; I just found the difficulty was enough so that game did not become tedious.

All in all I really enjoyed the game; it was just a fun game that I could play for an hour here and there. Like so many other games I did not have to play it for extended periods of time to feel I had accomplished something.

My one critique of the game is that at times it did drag there were some missions that where put in for the sake of a mission. At one point in the game your army is split into three groups and each group is trying to get towards a tower for the final battle to save the world. Well on the way each of the three groups has to fight several battles so this just artificially increases the length of the game. Similarly when you are in the final tower there is several battle that serve no purpose other than increase the game length. This maybe increases the game length by about 5 hours maybe, which is not bad but they did not need to extend this game.

Another thing that was interesting is that your characters gain levels but there certain characters that are good when you get and they are always good. There are others that are useless when you get them and never get any better, it does not matter how many levels they get they always stink. I would have liked them to give you a character that starts off horrible but if you can keep them alive they become really powerful. As it is there are certain characters that just annoyed me so I pretty much killed them off.

Anyway I would really recommend this game, it was the first game on the Wii that I really enjoyed playing by myself, i.e. not a party or group game.

2008 03 01 Blogroll
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My Lemon 2004 Mazda 3 GT Sedan

Monday was the straw the broke them camel’s back with me and my Mazda 3. I had gone to see Heather at the University of Waterloo and was maybe the university for maybe 30 minutes. I came out and got in my car and it would not turn on, I would turn the ignition and every light on the dash would turn on but no engine noise at all. I called Mazda road Side assistance, AKA CAA and they sent out a tow truck. Monday was the straw the broke them camel’s back with me and my Mazda 3. I had gone to see Heather at the University of Waterloo and was maybe at the university for maybe 30 minutes. I came out and got in my car and it would not turn on, I would turn the ignition and every light on the dash would turn on but no engine noise at all. I called Mazda road Side assistance, AKA CAA and they sent out a tow truck.

The guy from Mazda Road Side Assistance though maybe it was a battery, although he conceded it made no sense since the car had only sat there thirty minutes. But we tried to jump my Mazda with no luck at all so he towed it to the nearest Mazda dealership. I was not happy at this point this is the third major incident with this car since I purchased itThe first time the transmission failed was on the 401 one day, I was doing about 120 and all of a sudden the car dropped to 1st gear. This caused the RPM’s on the engine to red lined and the front of the car just drop, luckily there was no one right behind because I probably would have been killed. I got the car back to Guelph in basically 2nd gear and they replaced the transmission, axels’, drive shaft and some computers. All under warranty was not a big deal, stuff happens especially when you buy a car in its first model year. Anyway after getting the car back the transmission failed yet again and they had to basically the same repair two weeks later but this time I had to have it towed in.

With the latest incident I immediate thought it was another transmission. But apparently my car not starting was a figment of my imagination, Heather’s imagination and the CAA’s driver’s imagination. I called Mazda the next morning and they can find nothing wrong with my car at all! It started fine and they where confused why it was towed in.So there is clearly something wrong with my car again and I need a reliable car I can not have one that is going to continue to fail like this. Let along the fact I simply do not trust it all any more, I have no confidence that it will start at any given moment.

I am not blaming Mazda for this really, there is always a chance you can get a Lemon and I clearly got one when I purchased my Mazda 3. But pardon the pun it has soured me towards Mazda and I really don’t know if I would buy another Mazda vehicle at this point. After this latest incident I decided my Mazda 3 had to go, so yesterday I went to Guelph Nissan dealership and ordered a Black All Wheel Drive Nissan Rogue, with Leather and Technology package. It is going to take about seven to ten days for them to get me my new truck. I am really excited to get my new toy at get rid of my lemon Mazda 3 GT.

2008 02 07 Blogroll
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Car shopping II: Toyota RAV4, Ford Edge, Honda CRV and Nissan Rogue

Yesterday Heather and I went car shopping again, this time we test drove a Toyota Rav4, Honda CRV and Nissan Rogue again, we attempted to test drive a Ford edge. We went to the Guelph Auto Mall again for the most part since it just so covenant having all the dealerships side by side.

We started first with the Toyota Rav4, which both Heather and I liked generally speaking. It has a lot of pickup and go and inside is nicely laid out and seems to be functional. There are lots of options for the RAV4 ranging from all wheel drive to front wheel to 4 cylinders and 6 cylinder engines. However, it is one of the more expensive trucks that I am looking at, which is compounded by the fact Toyota’s financing rates are pretty high as well. I like the truck and I am considering it still, it is also one of the more reliable SUV’s on the market right now. But the financing rates are little much in my opinion but the fact the Toyota is still selling a lot of RAV4’s even with these rate does say a lot of about the quality of them. My main complaint about the RAV4 is the body shape is pretty boxy, especially when you compare it to the Nissan Rogue. But this is true for most of Toyota’s cars they make very reliable cards and trucks but they are not very flashy.

After leaving Toyota we went to Wayne Pitman Ford to look at the Ford Edge. We stood around the show room for about five minutes before someone finally came over and asked if they could help us, he clearly was not interested in showing us anything. Finally he found the keys to show us an edge, but he spent the entire bashing other manufactures he did not attempt to sell the edge to us. He also told us to book a test drive if we want to drive one. I was not all the interested in the Ford Edge since it is a larger truck then what I want but this put the nail in the coffin for this truck. I am sorry when I show up to look at truck tell me about the truck do not bash other manufacturers.

Also do not tell me to book a test drive if I want to take one out, does he seriously think I will be back? I can see why Ford is in so much trouble, I was interested in looking at their truck now I am not at all.

After this failed attempt to look at Ford Edge at Wayne Pitman ford in Guelph we went to the Honda Dealership in Guelph to look at a CRV. Not sure what it was with Heather and I and bad sales people but the guy at Honda was not much better than the guy at Ford. But at least this guy offered to take us for a test drive, but I think he said maybe fifty words the entire time. He did not sell the truck at all or really ask any questions of us. By the comparison the sale person at Toyota asked a lot of question and was interested in wining our business
.
Anyway back to the Honda CRV, both Heather and I did somewhat like the CRV. It does drive very nicely and it seems to have lot of guts. I am not a fan of the styling of the truck it is extremely boxy much like the Toyota RAV4. But it does get good gas mileage and it has won a lot of awards. A couple of things that I really hated about the CRV is that the leather in the truck is horrible, it is very loose fitting and is grey. This is Honda’s leather in general it does not tight so I can see it catching dirt and crumbs. My sister had a Honda Pilot and the leather just was not very nice. The other thing that I do not like is dash board is very edgy it not smooth. I am talking the area on top of the dash board where the windshield fits, there are lots of little crevice’s and valleys that will get full of dust.

After leaving Honda I thought it would be a good idea to drive a Nissan Rogue again then I would have driven the three trucks that I am considering back to back. However, we went the dealership in Kitchener rather than Guelph. This is because the Guelph dealership has annoyed me, I contact the person Heather and I talked to last weekend via email to discuss price. I asked him for a price on a Nissan Rogue AWD SL with Leather Premium and Tech package basically a fully loaded Rogue. The price he came back with floored me, it was $500 above MSRP, I mean give me a break. I replied back with why is the price above MSRP he said oh we can figure it out when I came in to discuss price. Ok he just gave a me price above list does he really think I will come in to discuss price with him? To make matters worse the guy has put me some Nissan Spam list! Guelph Nissan has a reputation for being pretty slimy, a lot of people have told me not to deal with them. I can now see why…

Anyway we went to the Kitchener dealership and took out a Rogue again and it is still my favorite car of everything that I drove. The package that Nissan has does annoy me, if I want leather I need to get the AWD version. If I want a blue tooth setup I have to get the AWD and leather package. They should give a Leather option for the Front Wheel Drive trucks and also the blue tooth package or technology package should be available not matter what. I also don’t like the fact that you pretty much forced to get a 6 CD changer and you also get a MP3 hook up. Who still wants a 6 CD changer anymore let along if you have an MP3 player?

Right now the Toyota RAV4 and Nissan Rogue are my top picks for my next vehicle. My one concern with the Rogue is that it is first generation vehicle so they may not have worked out all of kinks and well I did not have a lot of luck with my 2004 Mazda 3 GT that was also a first generation car.

2008 01 20 Blogroll
Heather
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