*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I hate when things break.  When I was a child growing up my Father always told me, “Boy, you can tear up an anvil”.  Well Dad, today I tore something else up.  Something that meant the world to me.  Something that made the time warp continuum disrupt.  My Rock Band bass foot pedal broke.  The weird thing is I have no idea how this happened.  I played Rock Band this morning for about 30 minutes and then slid the drum kit back out of the way.  I then took a shower and went to town and came back. 

Fast forward to a few hours ago and my wife said, “Hey, let’s play Rock Band.”.  I politely obliged her and reached for the drum kit.  As soon as I moved it I noticed the pedal was broken.  How could this be?!  I have no idea how this got broken but it did.  Here is what it looks like.

As you can tell it is completely broke at the base and obviously pointing in the wrong direction. 

The first thing I did was try to get a replacement.  After all the unit is under warranty.  After going through a whole bunch of web sites I finally found where I needed to be. Turns out that Electronic Arts does the warranty for Rock Band, not Harmonix.  Here’s the link you need to get support for Rock Band.

http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/rockband.php

The site requires that you have an EA account, if you don’t have one, you’ll have to create one.  There are two ways to get a replacement:  express or standard.  Express is done by shipping a replacement item which requires a credit card.  I chose this option since it is faster.  Yet another reason to own an American Express card.

After ordering my replacement I started looking for ways to keep this from happening again.  It seems there are plenty of ways to make the foot pedal stronger.  There are metal replacements and wood replacements available from either Amazon or Ebay.   For example this one is called the Pedal Metal – Billet. 

Basically it is an aluminum plate that replaces the plastic one.  It definitely should last longer.  I plan on waiting until I get the new pedal in to see if it is made any better before deciding to upgrade it.  In the mean time, I am back to playing Guitar until it comes in.

It was December 2001 when my wife bought me a Tivo for Christmas (see tivo review). At the time I loved it. It was the best thing since electricity. I decided to not purchase the lifeline subscription because I knew something better was going to come out with more hard drive space, ethernet etc. As it turns out I was right. Back then I think it was soemthing like $9.95 per month. Not too bad really. I remember walking around the office after returning from Christmas break selling Tivo to everyone. One of my co-workers at the time, Mike Kimsal listened to how things worked and in true Mike fashion researched it to death and when he decided he wanted one, like a true geek he wanted it RIGHT THEN! It’s funny because he called me on Super Bowl Sunday during the game wondering where he could get a Tivo in Ann Arbor. Luckily I had Tivo so I could pause the game otherwise he would have been in big trouble. I kept the Tivo around and kept selling them to anyone that asked and that would listen. By now they were becoming main stream. Sorta like Google where you hear people say “google for it” you started hearing people say I “Tivoed” so and so show last night. Probably a year or so after we owned the Tivo they released a newer version which could get its listings via wireless download. We upgraded ours and continued to use Tivo. By this time the price had gone up to $12.95 a month though. Where am I going with this posting you ask? Well, earlier this week Tivo announced new pricing plans. They’ve gotten rid of the lifeline subscription and instead charge you $19.95 a month or $224 prepaid if you want to buy a year in advance. Thanks but no thanks Tivo! I haven’t posted about it to the blog but I took my Shuttle PC I purchased back in 2003 and converted it to run Windows Media Center several months ago, Novemeber 2005 to be exact. The only thing I had to do to convert it to media center was purchase a Haupaugge MCE 500 tuner. It has two tuners on it which allow you to record two shows at once or watch one and record one. As a side note about MCE you could even add two MCE 500 cards and record 4 shows at once, how cool is that? So for about a $100.00 I took an existing PC and converted it to Media Center and don’t have to pay Tivo a DIME every month. You can do your own research about media center but its a very cool platform and there are tons of hacks and even a complete API to develop custom plugins for it. After several months MCE is still running and recording shows all for the low low price of $0.00 per month. Besides the fact you have a computer and can do WAY more with it than the Tivo I call it a win. Wake up Tivo, you are approaching having to be put into the budget with your pricing and there are cheaper ways to get the same thing.

I haven’t posted any game related stuff to the site for quite sometime, mostly because I haven’t had time to post anything due to the classes I am teaching and work. My taxes were done this past week and due to the large amount of money we owed I had to do something to lift my spirits, I bought a new game.

I recently acquired a GeForce 3 nVidia card by VisionTek and got it working under Debian Linux. Read more for the details!

For all of you Quake fans who just can’t seem to get enough of QIII, I have re-launched my Q3F server. I also decided to add some stats on the side of the site. Now we know when someone else is playing on the server as well as provide a visual so we can see what is going on.