bid chronicles

Why do they complicate a guys life?

Eto Kashey Tubo Durey,
Valobasho Keno Goponey

About a week ago, I picked up a EA demo CD from Worst Buy, mainly becuz it contained Need For Speed Most Wanted. So yesterday I finally got to give it a spin. It would have been earlier if I actually had a console, or if they were nice enough to release a PC demo, but noooo EA is too good for that. Anyway, I digress.

The Demo consists of three races of which we just saw two. The first was a timed run with several checkpoints and, of course, cops. Beating the time was a bad enough as it was, but after you beat the time, the cops just don’t leave you alone, you get one minute to not get busted. If you manage that, then the next one, a street race, unlocks. I didn’t manage to go past that race.

The graphix of the game was more of less as expected - an upgrade over NFS:U2 and a bit darker. Even though compared to NFS:U2 the entire setting is in the morning, the game has a film noir kinda look. It was very interesting. The music was great too. And the game play was actually quite good. Though I have to say that it felt much harder than the Underground series. Even the cops were sometimes harder to avoid.

What was neat though was that the music will change when the cops show up on radar, and right before that switch your screen with flash, so you know something is happening regardless. The other thing that was neat was that you could knock down a lot more stuff this turn. The racing level has beams that you can break and it falls on the road blocking at least half of the way.

Can you tell that I am looking forward to this title?

Besides the fact that the movie and the music industry are a bunch of very green and greedy monkeys, Apple has managed to drop the amount of music piracy thru iTunes. But can they do the same for the movies? I doubt it. Why? Well I have my reasons. Firstly let me explain why the two worlds are different no matter how similar they are. There are very few people like me who would go after collecting a whole album for just one song. And that was also back in the Napster days. Back then MP3s was the shit. But then the whole lawsuit thing came along.

Anyways, the thing about the music world is that there are tons of time one will just like one or two tracks from a CD and not the rest. So it makes complete sense that given the opportunity people will buy those tracks only and not shell out money for the whole CD. However, I do know a bunch of people who did buy a whole CD just for one track. Well, they did before iTunes came along. iTunes and the other music stores gave the users a wonderful opportunity for buying only they tracks they want. No more selling an album with one title song that is just awesome while the others are just way below par. Trust me, there are tons of those too.

Now with videos however things are different. I can see music videos being bought for a wonderful price of $1.99, but I don’t while see movies and TV series bought in the same rate. I mean think about it. There is a good chance that one might want just one particular music video instead of the whole DVD from that artist. But what are the chances that someone will get only 1 episode of a TV series? I mean most of the time if someone wants to own a TV series is becuz they really like it. At least that’s the way I am. And so far I haven’t heard of people just wanting to own 1 episode of a TV serial.

And as for movies, I will agree that not always someone cares about the extras that come with it. Even tho Apple have not put a price on movies (or mentioned anything about selling it), one can hope that it will be less than $5. I don’t really see myself seeing a movie that was encoded in 480×272 resolution. I’d much rather get the DVD. Granted that using the H.264 encoding scheme the quality of the video is quite high. There’s something about blwoing up a native 480×272 video on to a 1600×1200 screen that bothers me. I can’t say how pixelated it gets, but it a scary thought. My guess would be that digital copies of the movies will serve as a cheap alternatives for DVDs at most. And with 10 MB for every minute (approximately), a one hour movie will be about 600 Mbs.

This all is just my two cents…. of course.

Yes. That’s all I have to say today. Meebo. If this is what Web 2.0 has for us. Then I say go for it, by all means! What? You don’t want to check it out if I don’t tell you what it is? Fine. Meebo is an AJAX messenger that will let you connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber (including GTalk). It runs right there in your browser and there is no downloads or anything of that sort. Now would you go and check?

Who would have thought!? That traffic lights were the culprit. Well, let me explain. I currently live 19.2 miles away from work. So that’s 19.2 miles that I have to drive 5 days a week. Now that’s not really a big problem. I lived like 17 miles away the first year at work. The problem mainly is that from my new place there is no interstate that I can hop on and go to work; it’s all inside roads. Now that biggest problem is the first 3.2 miles takes about one-third of the time it takes me to drive the rest. Isn’t that just insane?

For days I have been trying to figure out a good time to leave, and the only good times seems to be after 9, which means I am late for work. The next few days I have been trying to figure out exactly why the traffic was so bad. And I think I finally found the culprit. In this small stretch of the road there are 9 traffic lights. And each of them are unique made to trigger for short bursts of traffic. Which bassically eventually causes the traffic to back up all the way. The fun part is, right after that, the road becomes a single lane and that has less traffic problems than this stretch. So, can’t we extend the short bursts by just a tiny little bit? I mean come on!