More blood, revamped
Yesterday I had my follow up blood draw for my thumb problems. Once again I had mumbling Justin Beiber doing the draw. Again he said next to nothing during the procedure and what he did say I could not understand. My thumb is still not right.
They day after I stopped my steroid treatment the pain started to come back. It hasn’t relapsed to the unusable state it has the other three times but it definitely is still not right. I have a follow up next week at the clinic where we will go over the latest blood work and develop a new course of action. I am still holding out hope that it will just heal up on it’s own.
I turned on my Xbox 360 last night to watch some stuff on Hulu and was greeted by a lengthy software update. I had read about some big changes coming to Xbox around the holidays so I wasn’t terribly surprised. The update took quite awhile and required several restarts of the system.
When it was done I was presented with a totally new interface. Personally, I thought the old Xbox menu system was pretty damn easy to use and intuitive. My initial impression of the new UI was not quite as easy or intuitive although it may just be a case of it being different.
I spent some time digging through the menus, identifying where stuff now resides. Evidently this new UI is meant to be in the same vein as the new Windows Phone operating system as well as the UI utilized by the next Windows desktop release.
This change also affects some of the apps I use often like Netflix and Hulu. Both of these have been redesigned to follow the same design/control template. Again it is different but I wouldn’t call it better at this point.
However the coolest part isn’t the new UI, it’s under the hood. In addition to the existing apps like Hulu, Netflix and ESPN, there is a boatload of new content coming online. There will be integration with YouTube, SyFy, UFC, Spike, HBO2GO and at least a half dozen others coming soon. Unfortunately some of this will require you to have a existing account with certain cable tv providers but some of it won’t.
Another cool feature is cloud integration. This allows you to treat the cloud as just another storage device. One great use is you can now dump all of your saved game info to the cloud, no more lugging shit on a USB drive. An even cooler application is your profile can now roam in the cloud, eliminating the very inconvenient thumb drive dance households with multiple 360’s currently do. (like me)
There is new integration into Facebook and Twitter as well with UI’s to do both built in. I tried it last night and it worked well, I even posted a small status update via my 360. The post made me yearn for a keyboard to type on. Trying to use the onscreen keyboard with a controller is just annoying as shit and slow.
I was thinking about just using a long USB extension cord to hook up a regular keyboard to the 360. However instead I decided to go this route. It will be wireless, take up a lot less space, be easier to store and should dramatically increase my text entry speed. I am a pretty good two thumb typist. I picked this up for less than $30 on Ebay. Hopefully it isn’t a piece of shit.
The last cool thing I noticed was even greater integration with Kinect, allowing you to do voice and gesture commands to quickly find and navigate the system. Unfortunately my Kinect is on the great room 360. I really don’t want to move it back and forth as needed since the great room tv set up is far from convenient to change.
My plan there is to first check and see if Randall actually uses the Kinect hardware I gave to him. If he doesn’t I can use that. If he is a Kinect user then I can pick up just the Kinect hardware for a few bucks.
Tonight is the running club’s annual Christmas party. It is always held on a weeknight to minimize conflicts with other holiday parties/commitments on the weekends. I always wish it wasn’t that way. I don’t get to party much at all so when I do I like to go hard. Going hard isn’t all that much fun when you have to get up for work at 5:30 the next day. Oh well.