Ethan and Nanny on Flickr.
Ethan and Nanny.
Video Game Catch Up
I haven’t posted about video games in a while, so I thought I’d just give a quick summary of what I’ve played over the past few months.
- Portal 2
- Killzone 3
- Stacking
- Enslaved Odyssey to the West
- Halo Reach
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Quake Arena Arcade (just not the same without a mouse)
I enjoyed all of these games, some more than others. I liked the story in Enslaved, the style of Stacking and the multiplayer of Killzone 3.
Anyway that’s a quick summary of the games I’ve played lately.
I’m hoping to check out Infamous 2 in the near future.
Corsair H50 Cpu Cooler
I purchased / installed the Corsaire H50 Cpu Cooler tonight in my home computer. I’m running an AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU. With the OEM heatsink and fan It was running at around 55 Celsius idle and around 65 Celsius under load. The stock cooler was also extremely loud. Best buy had the Corsair H50 cooler on sale for $40.00 Memorial Day weekend, so I picked one up hoping to reduce noise, and heat.
So far my computer is much quieter and much cooler. It’s running idle around 43 Celsius and 55 Celsius under load. So far I’m really happy with the results.
The install was relatively easy, but it did require me to remove the motherboard entirely. This wasn’t really difficult, but definitely inconvenient.
I’d have to recommend this CPU cooler if you have a PC running hot, or one that is too loud. I’m a happy customer. I hope it lasts a long time!
Rating: Buy!
- < whartung> as they say, those who do not know lisp will eventually reinvent it -- badly.
PS3 Repair
As I mentioned in an early blog post my PS3 died with a Yellow Light of Death(YLOD). It was an upleasent experience, but I ended up purchasing a new PS3 slim and all has been well.
Even before I purchased the new slim I thought about trying to find a used ps3 with a broken blu-ray drive so that I could attempt to get one ps3 working without wasting a lot of money. I just recently purchased a broken ps3 and managed to get it working using the blu-ray drive from my old ps3.
There was one trick to this though. Apparently the ps3 blu-ray drive has a controller on it which is tied to the motherboard on the ps3 by some kind of hardware identifier or something. So to swap the blu-ray drives I had to also swap the controller out on the drives.
I ended up with a fully operation backwards compatible 20gb ps3 for $75.00. I think things turned out nicely.
*I also replaced the 20gb drive with a 500gb drive
Swimming
We took Ethan swimming today at our neighborhood pool. He really likes the baby pool, but he’s not a huge fan of the big pool. We have a life jacket for him to wear in the big pool, but he’s still extremely cautious even with the life jacket on. He mostly hangs out on the steps. Occasionally he’ll “swim with dada”, which consists of me pulling him around the pool for a few seconds before he gets ready to go back to the steps. Today he broke the trend when we told him it was time to go. He didn’t have his life jacket and he took off running to the big pool. I was chasing after him, but before I could catch up with him he jumped in! I jumped in right after him and pulled him above water. Ethan coughed a few times and I told him “It’s ok” which he kept repeating to me while we were swimming back to the edge of the pool.
Now we know he’s not scared of the water! I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we had a good time and everyone is ok!
IMG_2155 on Flickr.
I can’t believe it’s been almost two years since our trip to New York! We really need to go back It was a lot of fun!
This is one of Ethan’s early attempts at using a fork. We thought it was pretty funny.
The Dark Side
Well I guess I’ve officially turned to the dark side. The primary platform I’m using for development at work is now Microsoft .net 4.
C# is a pretty nice language, and Visual Studio 2008 is bearable if you install Resharper, but I’ll be honest. I hated it at first. My first project was creating services exposed via WCF. WCF is a nice web services framework, but there was a pretty big learning curve on how to get everything working properly. There are also challenges when trying to call Java based web services through a WCF client, but I’ll get into that some other time.
I did do some scripting work using IronPython as part of my service, so who knows there could be hope for me yet!
- <whartung> I feel working with NetBeans is like living with an abusive spouse.
