For those of you buying Xbox 360s, you’ll get a wireless controller with the “premium” system. It comes with two standard AA batteries. Microsoft would like to sell you the Xbox 360 Play and Charge kit for your wireless controller that provides a rechargeable battery pack and a cable that connects the wireless (?) controller to the Xbox 360 allowing you to charge the batteries while playing. This is a workable solution, but to me is less than ideal as, for at least some of the time, your controller will have to be tethered to the console. Whether you do this at night while you sleep or while you play is not pertinent… it’s still sitting out plugged in to the 360.

A wildly better alternative is a set of rechargeable batteries and charger. Note that I didn’t get it there, that’s the only place I could find online that had the one that I actually have. I bought mine at my neighborhood Lowe’s for something like $17 or so. Compared with the $39.95 $19.95 of the Play and Charge kit, I now have 4 rechargeable batteries — meaning I can leave one pair in the charger charging and ready for use any time the ones I’m using go flat — that each actually yield longer play time due to their 2500 mAh storage rating. And I never, ever have to have my wireless controller tethered to the 360. A further benefit is that they’re standard AA batteries. If you discover a need for AA batteries, you can use the second set of batteries for that purpose, whereas the official 360 battery is a dedicated form factor.

Battery life has been astounding. You remember when I got my 360, right? Midnight of November 21st to refresh your memory. It is now Thursday, December 1st. I’ve put many hours into playing with the 360, though not as much as some gamers, obviously. I haven’t touched the second pair of batteries yet and still have 3 bars on the set in my controller according to the dashboard. That’s a good purchase.

UPDATE: It is now Tuesday, December 6th and I’m still on that first charge. Color me amazed.

You know it’s getting serious when you add a “Photography” category. I love my new Canon Digital Rebel. More importantly, Cat loves her new Canon Digital Rebel. The crispness of the pictures and the flexibility inherent in a D-SLR is just wonderful.

I took this picture in the backyard of a friend of mine at a shindig they were throwing to celebrate the sale of their house. I looked out the back door and saw this gorgeous tree in yard with perfect autumn colors and figured it was a good opportunity to take a picture of something other than Julia. I’m glad it turned out so beautifully.

There’s two versions, the artsy-fartsy version where I diddled a bit in Photoshop and a more traditional crop. Take your pick, I won’t be hurt.

1920 x 1200 | 1600 x 1200 | 1680 x 1050
1440 x 900 | 1280 x 1024 | 1280 x 960
1024 x 768 | 480 x 272

1920 x 1200 | 1600 x 1200 | 1680 x 1050
1440 x 900 | 1280 x 1024 | 1280 x 960
1024 x 768 | 480 x 272

Let me know what you think!

(I suppose I have to say this… the content downloaded from this web site, including but not limited to destop wallpaper, icon sets, themes, and articles, are licensed for personal use only. The copyright for this material is owned by the orignal author. None of the content from this site or its related sites may be redistributed in any form without explicit permission from the original author.)

Area Thief Discovers Prowler In Home

Good news for you Xbox 360 owners as there’s some new content with which to diddle. Last week saw the release of the Kameo and Madden 2006 demos, both of them reasonably hefty as well as the stalwart arcade thriller, Smash TV. Late in the week the Need For Speed: Most Wanted demo was released weighing in at a mind numbing 900 megabytes for those wanting to get their speed on.

Today another classic game sees its debut on the Xbox 360 Xbox Live Arcade, Crystal Quest. Originally created for the Macintosh II series, this one will find some tough competition in spiritual competitors like the original Robotron 2084 which is also scheduled to be released this month, Mutant Storm and the incredibly addicting Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved already discussed here many times. Interesting to see how many derivatives of Robotron are showing up on this system, though I suppose the dual analog joystick configuration of modern controllers fits the archetype perfectly.

A glaring weakness in the Xbox Live implementation

All of this content is thrilling and truly adds value to the system. Being able to download a demo of a game and play it — instead of waiting for things like monthly game discs from magazines — is incredibly convenient. But on such a powerful system, sporting 3 cores and half a gigabyte of memory, why am I forced to sit and stare at the download the entire time? Last time I checked, the FTP protocol, even encrypted, wasn’t so processor intensive as to require the resources of the entire machine. I should be able to at least go into the blades and listen to music, perhaps browse my friends list. It would of course be ideal to be able to play Xbox Live Arcade games or even full titles while downloading in the background though admittedly this would be more difficult to pull off. But there’s very little acceptable reason to not allow any activity while downloading. Let’s hope that Microsoft can correct this boof.

While the terms of service do not allow me to divulge actual numbers, I will say that I’m definitely sticking with the Yahoo Publisher Network for my advertising over their competitor Google AdSense. While I think that the ads themselves were much better focused and relevant on Google AdSense with generally higher click-through rates, I just wasn’t seeing revenue from them. Under Yahoo, I get less relevant ads and correspondingly lower click-through rates, but for those clicks I do get there is more than an order of magnitude more revenue generated. Enough to make it worthwhile, unlike under Google’s plan.

Put another way, I displayed AdSense advertising from June through November of this year. I never earned enough to break the minimum payment barrier, and wouldn’t have for probably another 6 months. Under Yahoo, I’ll actually receive a check in a relatively timely fashion at this rate. It ain’t “screw you money,” but it’s enough to matter and to fund my site plus a little extra. And that’s all I really require at this point.