Which of these does not belong?  Terrorism.  Patent reform.  Health Care.  Social Security.  Immigration.  Iraq.  Iran.  North Korea.  Economy.  Trade deficit.  National debt.  Steroids. 

Among the number of problems facing the US today, I know where I would rank steroid use in sports.  Yet, for whatever reason, Congress have made it a point to hold congressional hearings on steroid abuse in baseball.  Under what circumstances does it make sense for Congress to get involved?  This is a problem that the organization, MLB, should be handling. If anyone outside of MLB should care, it should be law enforcement… maybe even the FBI if you must make it a federal level investigation… checking out the illegal drug use angle.  It should definitely not be Congress!   President Bush even stuck his nose in there for some reason in a State of the Union address a few years ago - probably only because, surprise, he used to own a baseball team. 

On a similar note, some Congress members want to investigate the “Spygate” scandal in the NFL where the Patriots videotaped their opponents before the game.   Seriously?  Congress is now the enforcer when it comes to cheating in sports?  Let the NFL handle it! 

The abysmal approval ratings for Congress reflect their effectiveness at doing their job.  There are so many issues that could use some serious, realistic efforts… and yet, Congress is wasting time and money getting involved in something completely removed from their reason for existence - making laws.  

Epic announced today at Microsofts GDC conference that Gears of War 2 will be released in November. Gears of War being the only reason to own a XBox 360, this gives Microsoft a chance to hold on against the Playstation 3 in 2008.

I’m not the biggest Microsoft fan out there but I think they might actually have done something right for the first time in several years (ever?): XNA.  Like many software developers out there, I one day envisioned creating my own game.  The scale of game development has dramatically risen in the past several years and it’s almost impossible for small developer teams to finance a game.  There are options out there like Flash and WildTangent that are still manageable by solo/smaller development teams but puts the onus on the end-users to download and install a plugin or runtime.  In addition, they are both more suited toward casual game development as opposed to the more conventional games I’m more interested in.

XNA is much more interesting.  It’s designed to simplify general game development and allow smaller teams to develop a “real” game.  I’ve been following it from a distance but today at GDC, Microsoft is having a press conference where they are talking about XNA.  Already, they have announced that XNA games will be publicly available through Live.  I have a friend working on an XNA title that he was hoping to get published next year so I’m sure that will be a great help for him.

Sony and Nintendo (well… soon enough) each have their own “indie” game development platforms though Microsoft’s Live service seems to be the most successful.  The accessibility and (now) the distribution of XNA games is really intriguing — Perhaps I’ll have to look into diverting my focus to this for a short time as opposed to my other goals.

Verizon has announced new “unlimited” calling plans that are, not surprisingly, a little less than I would have hoped for. The plans range from $100 to $140 for single-line phones but unlimited only refers to the calls you make - the $120 plans includes unlimited texting, the $140 unlimited data. How are those news-worthy? $120-$100=$20 for unlimited texting… Seriously? As for the unlimited calls, the number of minutes on calling plans has gone up so much in the past few years, does anyone ever go over their minutes? Even with AT&T, Christina and I never go over and have accumulated some absurd number of rollover minutes.

More telling is why they’re doing it. Sprint has been testing the waters on similar plans and it’s likely AT&T and others will follow suit. Since the actual benefits to the customer are negligible, it’s certainly more of a marketing ploy than anything. It appears the cell companies new customer rates are dropping and so the only way to grow is to steal customers from each other. Thus, promoting new, marginally different, plans.

Sorry, Verizon. For now, I’ll stick w/ AT&T - I like them better as a company and I might want one of their exclusive iPhones soon. You can change my mind very quickly if you ever get around to deploying FiOS to my house, though…

Update: Geez… that was quick. AT&T will be offering “unlimited” plans for about the same price starting Friday.

I saw this coming: HD-DVD is dead. Dying, at least. So much talk about the “HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray” war was being written about yet here and there, there were several signs that Blu-Ray was going to be the eventual winner. In the last few weeks, the HD-DVD group has taken a beating.

If I was going to use an analogy, I would say the HD-DVD v Blu-Ray was like a boxing match between two kids who’d never been in a fight before. Really tentative, a basic stalemate. Then, all of a sudden, HD-DVD threw a punch (Paramount saying they were going HD-DVD exclusive) that no one expected to hit but did - and really jarred Blu-Ray. However, HD-DVD seemed as shocked as Blu-Ray and simply managed to piss off Blu-Ray. So Blu-Ray threw all caution to the wind and just started wildly throwing punch (Warner Bros exclusive) after punch(Walmart, Best Buy not stocking HD-DVD) until HD-DVD capitualated.

Much has been made of the spectacularly terrible launch of the PS3 (the best Blu-Ray player out there) yet it looks like Sony will eventually come out on top after all. It just took them a lot longer than anyone thought.

Update: It’s official.

Had a technical issue today that had never cropped up before. I had been presenting a list of files with their last “change” time. After an infrastructure change, all the files had been moved and the change time now reflected yesterday. However, the “modification” time still had the correct date. A quick modification to use modification time instead of change time resolved the situation but how many regular, everyday users would understand the difference between the two?

I have a Motorola RAZR cellphone and I think it’s safe to say I hate it. It doesn’t hold a charge (yeah, I know it’s probably a battery issue), the OS is slow, it’s very limited in functionality, blah, blah, blah. My pre-RAZR phone was also a Motorola… and had pretty much the same issues. Why I have had some blind loyalty to Motorola is a mystery but regardless, it’s gone now. I love the new iPhone but I wonder if I’ll feel “limited” by it. The Android platform that Google is building certainly seems intriguing but so does the Garmin Nuvifone. The Nokia N95 is supposed to be amazing as well and people seem to be interested in the Modu thing. It’s taken companies much too long to start pushing out decent phones but now there’s almost too many choices. On the other hand, it looks like I have to wait until late this year before I get a new phone… and I could use one now.

Spore is being released Sept 7th.  I’ve been waiting for this game for years.  Plus, it looks like they’re releasing it on Mac so I’ll have a game to play with on my laptop.  I can’t wait.

Christina wanted a more reliable car for her errands today so I took her car this morning and left her mine.  Unfortunately, I forgot to get my office key off the keychain.  Couple that with my coworker staying home to take care of her kids as school opened late today, I got a nice 3 hour "break" in the hallway outside my office this morning.  Oi.

 Today was a pretty nasty day outside.  Very cold, rainy, icy, and treacherous.   As has become all too common, our kindly mail person left our mailbox open.   Annoying if you have a mailbox that opens on the side - which we don’t.  Ours opens from the top like all the mailboxes in our townhouse division so all the rain and ice comes right on in if you leave the top open.  The mail today was literally iced into the box and ripped as I pulled it out.  Not only do they the top open on a regular basis, but they only pick up our outgoing mail about 1/3 of the time.  Usually, they just throw the incoming mail in the box on top of the outgoing mail.  What can you do though?  I think there’s a way to report issues but do I really want to anger the person who delivers my mail?