Here’s my son playing his Yamaha DTX drum kit. He’s playing along with a song that’s built into the Casio digital drum set that’s near him.
Gotta say I agree with this. Not because I have something against Twitter (I don’t), but because as a software designer and database guy who sees the value of “community”, this is just real, real bad.
We’ve spent a year with an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii. I just sold the Wii (and all the games and accessories). The Xbox 360 gets used quite often. The Wii didn’t. In the year we had it, we used it about 6 times: When we first got it, three times when people from out of state came to visit and wanted a demo, and two times when we got a new game and wanted to try it out. I think we might have turned it on a couple other times to vote on the voting channel (which, as it turns out, was the only thing we actually enjoyed doing on the Wii).
The more I read about the Wii (and look at the large number of Wii ads on Craigslist), the more I’m convinced of the following: The Wii is outselling the competition to be the number one selling console. The Wii does not sell as much software (read: “as many games”) as the competition. After a few weeks or months, many, many Wiis are just sitting, gathering dust.
This article (here), explains Nintendo’s problem with the Wii very well. “E3″ is an industry expo where video game companies will announce new hardware and new games. From the article:
And now, our E3 headliners? Instead of leveraging its market share for equally innovative and expressive gaming experiences, we get air guitar with less plastic, and Wii Sports, again.
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Wii Sports Resort is not mainstream acceptance. Animal Crossing: City Folk is not pushing boundaries. These games are the easy sell, getting the little console that potentially could into a slew of living rooms, where people will giggle once or twice at the novelty of tossing yet another Frisbee at yet another dog. Of shaking fruit trees and leaving notes for friends. And then they’ll dismiss it all, once again, as child’s play.These “games” are the reason the Microsoft and Sony camps can dismiss the Wii as a fad.
On the fantastic album “Blinking Lights and Other Revelations”, the Eels have a great song called “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)”. I was reminded of this song title two times during April when I did some things that I never thought I’d ever do.
Early April I was up near Winter Park at a men’s retreat with friends from church. After doing about 90 minutes of snow shoeing in five feet of snow up the side of a mountain (and back down again), I found myself soaking in an outdoor hot tub surrounded by all that snow. And it was snowing while we were in the hot tub. It was beautiful.
Then in late April, my wife, son and myself did some tent camping with the Cub Scouts. That’s not really that big of a deal, except that during the night the temperature got down to somewhere between 10 and 15 degrees. That was some serious coldness! I caught a fish doing some fly fishing. I found that I really enjoyed that. My son is eager to go out and do some more of that with me soon.
Here’s an excellent article on the housing market. It is especially good at explaining the real costs and business sense involved in buying a house to rent it out. So start saving now and maybe sometime after 2012, you’ll be able to jump in.
My son (our oldest) came home from 2nd grade the other day really on edge. Upon asking him what the problem was he said, “I’m really worried that I’m going to be in big trouble because I think I know what the F-word is now.” So he spelled it quietly into his mom’s ear and, yep, some girl in his class taught him the F-word. So we explained that knowing the word isn’t going to get him into any trouble, but using it probably would. He sighed a sigh of relief and said, “Good, because I don’t even know what it means”. So I told him that it’s used in different situations to mean a lot of things and so a person has to be careful about how they use it. I told him that one of the meanings is that it is kind of the ultimate way of saying “Oh, Man!” when someone is super-duper upset. He said, “Oh, OK” and that was the end of that.
I missed this press release amongst celebrating two birthdays and Christmas. On 12/18, a press release confirmed that Peter Jackson (director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies) has settled all his lawsuits against New Line (the studio he worked for on LotR) and will be directing not one, but two movies based on “The Hobbit”. So there’s some much happy news to end the day with instead of that Best Buy rip off re: Blade Runner.
So rejoice with me. I’m off to dig in the fridge for an oatmeal stout.
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