360 where have you been all my life?, Turkey Bowl
My day yesterday was pretty ho hum until late in the afternoon.
Ali called me earlier in the day telling me about an annoying situation at work. They told her they needed her to relocate her office and her new space would be ready at a certain time. So Ali packed up all of her junk and was ready to move. The problem is the maintenance guy didn’t have time to set up the new space. So Ali has been in limbo with most of her junk in boxes, making getting anything done quite frustrating.
Well she had a bit of a meltdown yesterday and the maintenance guy responded by at least getting the counter top that was going to be laid on top of filing cabinets and supposedly cutting them to the correct width. However in order to put the stuff in place the old furniture in the new office had to be pulled out which he did not have time to do.
So anyway Ali called me close to 4 asking if I could possibly come over to help her finish the set up process. I told her I arranged to pick up an used Xbox 360 after work and the kid was only going to be around until 6 so it would be tough. You could hear the disappointment in Ali’s voice. I asked her if there were any men over there that could help her for 15 minutes but it seemed as though there wasn’t. Well it turned out I could leave work a bit early so I called her back and told Ali I would come over to see if we could get it set up quickly.
So I quick step back to the area for Ali’s new office and got busy. With Ali’s help we dragged all of the old furniture out behind the building and dragged in the filing cabinets and counter tops. It was a whirlwind process that we got done in less than 25 minutes. The counter tops unfortunately were not cut quite short enough, we needed about a half inch less length. We wound up just setting the one up where Ali will work and propped the other one on top of it. At least Ali now had a space to work. She was grateful for that.
So I didn’t have much time for kudos, I shot right back in the parking lot to meet up with my 360 guy. I saw his ad on Craigslist earlier in the day and emailed him. He was selling a 360 that was only a few months old. It included two controllers and a 60gb hard drive. He had it listed for $150.
I negotiated the price over email to $125 which he agreed to. He then asked me if I was interested in two remaining xbox games he had, Halo Reach and some driving game. He said he would throw them in for $15. That was fair since Reach costs $60 alone, I agreed to that as well.
Unlike the shady guy I negotiated with over the weekend this kid had no problem telling me his contact info and location. I pulled up to his apartment complex and he had me follow him through the gate in his Mercedes convertible! His dad is a lawyer and the kid just happens to be going to law school in Naples.
He was a nice kid and lead me up to his apartment. He hooked up the 360 and turned it on to show me it all worked. His apartment was a geek’s nirvana with a PS3, a Wii, big flat screen tv and several computers. We did some geek speak talking about the latest in torrent downloading as well as other gaming related subjects. After verifying all was cool I handed over the cash and was on my way.
When I got home I had a few things to do before I could play with my new toy. One of those things was to do another test of my weighted pull up progress. The last time I strapped on the 50 pound weight vest I only got two reps. I was pleased to double that total this time around. At this rate by the end of January Jeremy may just immediately start chugging the milk and skip the actual pulling altogether.
Finally I got to dig into the 360. I hard wired it to the second network drop in our bedroom. (yes I have CAT5E throughout the house) Within a few minutes I was online and playing around, man did I like what I saw.
Having the 360 in the bedroom allows me to enjoy it in my most comfortable position, laying in bed. Playing in bed has always been my most preferred location in my three plus decades as a gamer. The wireless 360 controllers make this even more enjoyable.
It didn’t take me long to see just how flexible and powerful of an entertainment option the console was. On top of being able to play incredible games it serves as your entertainment hub. You can use it to serve up video, music and pictures from your local network. You can also do the same thing online using the Zune application as well as Netflix.
The main reason I got the 360 however was for it to be my playon.tv portal. Up until this point I have used both my Wii and Ali’s Ipad for this. The Ipad experience with playon has been good. The experience with the Wii has not for several reasons.
The interface for navigating playon.tv with the Wii is just clumsy, requiring you to to point to buttons on the screen to navigate. Response is slow and the video streaming is not all that great due to Wii only having a wireless internet connection. On the 360 it is like night and day.
The hard wired connection provided much better performance as does the built in 360 interface for browsing media. I could zip through the playon tree structure effortlessly. Having the 360 connected via HDMI versus the composite only video of the Wii doesn’t hurt either.
I loaded up several shows on various “channels” and had good results consistently. I then spent some time dabbling around the other screens on the console. I was really impressed with the navigation system. It was extremely easy and intuitive. I was still signed in as the former owners account on Xbox live. He actually has some unused Xbox credits that I plan to use up before I create my own account. Those credits can be used to purchase any number of things.
Before going to bed Ali and I watched a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on the 360, via Hulu, via playon.tv. It was just like watching it on regular tv. I am quite pleased with my cable tv free existence at this point. To be honest, I really haven’t had to sacrifice much of anything and in some ways have actually been opened up to a whole new world of video content where the majority of what you want to watch is available 24/7, on demand, for free.
I didn’t like many aspects of living in PA but today is one of those days I wish I was back at my old stomping grounds. It is the day of the Turkey Bowl. The Turkey Bowl is something a bunch of us came up with when I worked at Entre/Ameridata/GE Capital. It was a two hand touch football game that we would do the afternoon before Thanksgiving.
We had good participation in the game always and the stakes were always high, bragging rights and such. Even though the game was supposed to be two hand touch there was always plenty of contact. I’ll never forget when I got spiked in the head (yes one guy actually wore spikes) while laying on the ground. I am sure I had a mild concussion.
Luckily we captured one of the best moments ever in Turkey Bowl history when one of the network techs that did a lot of bragging before the game got absolutely faked out of his jock by another guy that was at least 15 years older than him.
I really miss the camaraderie that I enjoyed during that 10 years of my life working there. Since moving to Naples there has been next to none of that. I now have very little interaction with fellow employees outside of the work environment. I was happy to hear however that the Turkey Bowl tradition has lived on without me and the game will once again be taking place today. Of course if I WAS there you know it would be streaming on justin.tv 🙂
My extended Thanksgiving weekend will start off with a 4 mile jaunt at the Thanksgiving day run tomorrow. There will be close to 2000 people there, it will be utter madness. I still don’t feel 100% recovered but I should be ok to at least do the run, just not at top speed.
After the race we will be picking mom up for a Thanksgiving visit/dinner. During the rest of the three day weekend I would like to get the trees trimmed and maybe even some decorations out, who knows? It would be nice to have it all handled. Yea maybe even some xmas shopping too, we’ll see.