As I mentioned I have had to reinstall my windows install due to the fact uninstalling Netgear Storage Control Manger (SCM) destroyed my Windows install. Luckely I was just doing an re-install of Windows so I do not loose any data.

However, I figured this would a good opportunity to test the restore capability of Mozy Home. I must say I was extremely impressed, I did the web restore so I just logged and selected the files that  I wanted to restore. I then waited a minute and I received and email with a link to website where I could download the files. It was very simple and easy to use.

Mozy also gives you the option of mounting a restore partition or having the data burnt to DVD and Fed Ex’d to you. This ease of use of this product has impressed me and I am now an even bigger fan of Mozy home and I would recommend that any who has important files use it, which is most computer users.

As I had mentioned in my previous posting I have started to have a lot of issues with my Netgear SC101 NAS. When I first purchased it and added it my network I was really happy with the device. But then I had partitions start to disappear and they where not easily restored and became a time sink.

I recently had to replace my motherboard, the hard drive controller stopped working on my old one. Anyway I picked up an ASUS P5K that has a raid controller for the IDE ports. Due to all of the issues I have been having with the Netgear SC101 I decided I was just going to remove the drives from unit and install them in my main system as a mirrored pair.

Everything worked fine, took about 20 minutes to mount the drives and setup the mirror. I like having a clean computer so I decided to remove the software that you have to install, Netgear Storage Control Manger (SCM) in order to use the SC101. I don’t like having extra software floating around that is not doing anything let along drivers. The uninstall requested a reboot which did not bother me. I was doing this remotely, connected to my computer using RDP, so I was not terrible concerned when I could not reconnect to my computer. I though maybe it just did a shut down rather then a reboot, annoying but not the end of the world.

Anyway when I got home I went to boot my computer and as soon as it go to the loading windows screen the computer would reboot. When I told the computer to boot into safe mode the computer would blue screen. I tried to recover the install by having windows do a repair on the install and still the computer would not boot. I finally had to reinstall windows.

So yup basically uninstalling Netgear’s crappy driver package destroyed my Windows XP install and required me to spend the next 6 hours over two days rebuilding my install. Needless to say I am now completely not impressed with Netgear, not only was the SC101 horrible but removing it force me to reinstall windows. Needless to say I will never be buying another Netgear product or recommending tit to people.

Today I gave up on Enchanted Arms on the Xbox 360. I am about 30 hours into the game and I a basically three battles from the end and I don’t have the patience to spend the next twenty hours to upgrade my character.

The funny thing was I had lunch with a friend and we where discussing what we where currently playing. I brought up that I was playing Enchanted Arms, he not heard of it and to be honest I had not either but I burrowed from a friend. Anyway I mentioned how on the back of the box it says 50 hours of game play and I commented too him I am not sure how it will be 50 hours. I was already near the end at about 28 hours and unless the game did something stupid like causing you restart the game or recomplete a dark work version type of thing there was no want it would be 50 hours.

Well I just discovered that is what happens in Enchanted Arms, the first 95% of the game is dead easy. I mean I play most of it while on the phone or doing other things, there is automatic combat that will work for all but the boss fights. So I got the what I have learnt is the third final boss and I hit a brick wall. I fought the boss about six times and each time just had my butt handed to me. So I got tired of this and read some walkthroughs and where shocked to find something, basically I was gong to have to spend the next ungodly amount of time leveling up my main character.

At the time of the final box I had about 2500 HP well most strategy guides say unless you have 7000 HP don’t even bother with the final boss you have no chance. Well there is that missing 20 hours of game play the box promised. Reading several websites this is common complaint about this game that the first last fight against the Queen of Ice is impossible, but after that the game gets easy again. Well I am not going to spend the next 20 hours or however long it will be to level up my character sorry. So instead I did a search for the ending on the internet and well here it is.

As you can tell from this video the game is very much a Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) and it has some pretty stereotypical characters and horrible voice acting. The good news is that the one really annoying homosexual character is only in the game for about the first two hours and then appears at the ending. The voice acting for this character is particular horrible and when I was playing I basically muted the first couple of hours, I was really happy when he got killed off so I did not have to suffer through his voice.

I did actually finish the game but only with the bad easy ending rather the good happy ending that required killing the ice queen. All in all I did somewhat enjoy the game, the story was not great but not horrible. It reminded of RPG on the NES, turned based random encounters etc.

The game is extremely easy and if you are into collecting achievement points I got 775 of them by getting to this point in the game. Probably some of the easiest achievement points you can get.

Today I finished Bioshock on my Xbox 360, I am not sure how long that game too to complete I am thinking maybe 20 hours. This was the second time that I attempted to play Bioshock when it first game out I tried it on the PC and I guess my system was not fast enough to play the game. At the time I thought the game looked decent and could be a lot of fun but I did not feel like upgrading my computer to play this one game. Especially since my system was well with the required specs to the play the game.

Anyway I burrowed Bioshock from a friend and decided I was going to play it through, over all I really enjoyed. The graphics are pretty good, there was very few video glitch’s at least that I noticed. The sound was extremely well done, the weapons sounded right and the sound helped to set the mood the game.

Bioshock has a pretty well developed story; the game is set in 1960 and starts you in plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean. You then find a light house that is connecting to an underwater city called Rapture. The story then develops and you quickly must deal with the famous morel dilemma in the game. Basically there are little sisters who are harvesting ADAM from people and are protected by Big Daddies, basically larger walking deep sea suits armed to the teeth. After you kill the Big Daddies you have to decide what you want to do with the little sister, you can harvest them which gives you more ADAM or free them and get less ADAM. The premise of the game is that the more little sisters that you harvest the easier the game is, but if you don’t harvest them the end of the game will be easier. Well I choose not to harvest them, for one reason really and that is that there an achievement reward for saving all the little sisters.

Anyway there are a total of thee endings to Bioshock, if you are interested here is video of them, this is obviously a huge spoiler.

If there was one thing that I did not like about Bioshock was that at times the game dragged a little. There was a couple of sections that was put in for the sake extending that game they are really don’t add much to the game.

A common criticism is that Bioshock is really just System Shock II redone in a deep sea environment and I have to agree with them. I did not play much of System Shock II but the little I remember the similarities in the game. Bioshock also steals a lot of things from the Fallout series in my opinion.

Here is the Zero Punctuation review of Bioshock, I find it amusing and it is pretty accurate also to my feelings on the game.

 

via videosift.com
 

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.

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.

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.

More Pictures Below

Like the marks on the Bumper? Some idiot parked my brail.

When Heather got me an Xbox 360 they threw in Turok as a free game. I finally got around to playing it and I can see why they gave you it for free, no one would pay for this game. I finally got around to trying it out about two weeks ago and I maybe played for two hours before giving up with it. It was not that the game is hard it just not a really good game.

The graphics in Turok on Xbox 360 are decent although enemies, items and pathways do tend to get lost in the background at times. The sound is not great, the weapons really don’t have much umph behind them so it feels like you are running around with a pee shooter, maybe this gets better later on.

From what I played of the game it is very linear which I do not mind generally speaking but Turok take linear game play to an extreme. Basically most of the game is just following a path and dinosaurs and random mercenaries attack you.

Another annoyance is that the game use check points to save, which drives me nuts. The Xbox 360 has a hard drive in it, you use it for saved games. What is even more annoying the fact there is a menu option to save, why is that there I have no reason, the game saves are check points only.

Here is a funny little review of Turok that pretty much sums my feelings on this one.

via videosift.com

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.

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.

As I mentioned late last year I picked up a Netgear SC101 NAS for my home network. I wanted to use for a central repository for pictures, so Heather could access them. I also wanted it as back up device.

We up it in I was very happy with it, it was easy to setup and seem to working well. I was very happy with it that is until I reinstalled my main computer, going from Vista to Windows XP.

When I installed the Netgear software and went to mount the drives I notice the SC101 is only showing 1 partition. I had setup it up with three partitions, one shared partition and a backup partition for myself and another one for Heather. But when I connect to the NAS it was only showing the share partition, needless to say I thought this was interesting.

I went up to Heathers computer and connect to the NAS and it showed two partition the shared partition and also her backup partition. However, the backup partition was showing as having a broken mirror. The shared drive which is also mirrored is showing fine.

Not sure what happened, I have spent maybe an hours over the last couple of weeks to resolve the issue. I have not had time to spend more time to get this resolved. I did some research on this it appears to be a very common issue that can be caused by many different issues.

I have posted on the official Netgear tech support forum and no one has replied. I will eventually get this resolved, but I have zero confidence in this device anymore. I have lost partition and another one has gotten corrupted, so two thirds of my partitions have failed.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

via videosift.com

via videosift.com

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.

I have spent much of the last three weeks talking to Orbex’s current clients and pretty much everyone has seen the move as being a very positive one for Orbex and for their organizations. They like the fact that we are still going to be focusing on small and medium business (SMB) and also for the most part the Orbex team has staying the same. Our clients still have the ability to call the people they have gotten accustomed to dealing with and we are able to help them solve their technology issues.

The main difference now is that we are able to bring a lot more resources in to help as needed. This also gives Orbex the abilities to offer solutions such as Citrix, Vmware and Cisco Unified Communications to our clients without have to bring in a third party.

Here is a copy of the article:

“The Formal Part”IT in

“The Interesting Part”Harry began our conversation by describing the Orbex acquisition as an opportunity to learn about serving the SMB market – and especially, the “S” part of this market. He makes the point – one which I’ve made in the past as well – that SMB isn’t a single market, but rather, can be segmented into many groups.Harry’s approach to segmentation is very interesting. He believes that success in the small business market will hinge on the ability to “assess the customer before they become a customer,” through use of a maturity assessment such as that provided by Gartner, or as part of the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization model. Harry believes that while an account doesn’t need to be large to offer the prospect of a good long-term relationship, they “need to have an understanding of where they want to get to.” This is, Harry says, the hallmark of “an account where we have a chance to be successful.”To evaluate customers in this way, Harry finds that his firm needs to get “beyond looking at IT.” Instead, they need to explore questions like:·                                 What is the customer’s vision?·                                 What are the growth opportunities in the customer’s business?

·                                 What is the “leverage in the business” – i.e., the extent to which they look to outside firms to provide non-core functions?

·                                 What is the level/pattern of delegation of authority within the customer’s business?

In the small business market, Compugen is looking for an engagement model that is “different from (that used with) traditional clients.” They look to act not as a product vendor, but to “take over day-to-day operations/management” of the IT infrastructure, while the customer “provides the business insight” needed to align IT capabilities with business requirements.In Harry’s view, most of the challenges involved in reaching this _object_ive revolve around “sales/sales engagement”. He is confident that Compugen’s managed services offerings – such as the eMerge asset management approach, which provides the ability to build to a consistent platform level and evolve customer infrastructure over time – will scale to meet demand in smaller organizations. What is tricky, he says, is to alter the traditional high-cost “press the flesh” sales approach with something that is better matched to the spending potential of small accounts.