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Spending the weekend with relatives in Erie, PA, we took a ride over to the Tom Ridge Environmental Center At Presque Isle. Very neat place. You can learn a lot about Erie and its environment. We passed a whiteboard so I had to draw a picture of my beautiful wife. It drew a pretty big crowd and was one of the more popular exhibits while we were there. People were laughing and some even took pictures of it. Not sure what they’ll do with those pictures, but I grabbed the one that you see here. The full length picture didn’t come out every well but at least I salvaged the head shot. There was a Cub Scout troop taking a tour of the place and they all made additions to the whiteboard picture.

On a trip to Best Buy we found the PS3 up and available to play. I stopped and talked to someone that was playing an NBA game and the graphics were interesting. The court, stands, crowd, uniforms, etc. looked amazing. The court looked unbelievably real. The player’s skin, however, looked plastic to those of us in the store watching. That was the only game you could demo so I have no idea how the PS3 holds up under high speed game play. What was surprising was that the PS3 locked up on us. The guy playing it mentioned that the Walmart up here has been through a dozen of them because they keep locking up. I hope he was just exaggerating because people are not going to put up with freezing and minute and a half (his comment) start times after paying $600 for a gaming device. He also mentioned that he owns a XBox 360 and that he thinks the graphics actually look better on the XBox. Interesting.

I’m just disappointed that there is a DVD format war happening between Blue-ray and HD-DVD. Sony is supporting Blue-ray and Microsoft is backing HD-DVD. I would guess the Blue-ray drive is what is pumping the PS3′s price so high. I’m one that will wait and see what the Nintendo Wii looks like. They had a space reserved for one but did not have one you could see or touch. I believe that will come out this week some time.

I did play one of the coolest video games ever while there. It’s called Guitar Hero and I had a blast playing it. If you’ve ever seen the Dance Dance Revolution games, just picture the same concept except instead of the dance mat you hold a small guitar in your hands. Instead of using your feet to land on the arrows you use your fingers and the guitar – all to rock songs. It was definitely a blast, but it looked like it was a Playstation only kind of thing. Too bad, because I don’t have a Playstation. If I did I would have bought the game. It was a blast.

Lastly, I had replaced the internal hard drive on my 15″ G4 Aluminum PowerBook a little while ago with a 160GB drive and I’ve been very happy with it. Unfortunately I didn’t test the Superdrive once I put everything back together, because I learned the hard way that I must have done something to break the drive. I tried to load a couple CDs in it yesterday and it just keeps spitting them out right away. I kept trying over and over and now it won’t even accept a disk in it anymore. I don’t have any of the necessary tools away from home, but I am hoping I can get it working again when we get home. I don’t use the drive that much, but it will be a requirement when I want to upgrade to OS X Leopard later. If you’re doing your own hard drive upgrade, be careful and take your time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 6:33 am and is filed under Entertainment, Games, Microsoft, Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.