DarqByte

Oddly enough, despite my recent posts about Need for Speed Undercover, this post really has nothing to do with it. Well, now it does since I mentioned it. And since I mentioned it, I’ll also mention that I’ve stopped playing it. Couldn’t keep my attention and some of the races were frustrating.

In any case, the real reason for speed is that we upped our Internet speed with our ISP, Embarq. Previously, we were at 3.0 mbps (Well, 1.5 but I’ll get to that), and now we’re at 5.0 mbps. Faster is gooder, yes?

So why did we up the speed? Do I need it for what I work on at home? No, not really. Do I need it for online gaming? No, not really, that’s still pretty quick and I don’t have much lag there. So why?

Netflix!

Laura and I recently signed up for Netflix, and it’s pretty cool. We have the 2 DVDs out at a time thing and they offer online streaming for free. Since we have an XBox 360, we can stream movies from Netflix over it.

When we first got the Netflix account, we were running on a slower speed, and I could never get anything above 2 bars (out of 4, kinda like a cellphone) for the picture quality. You’ve got to get to 3 or 4 bars to hit HD quality. Needless to say, this made The Office look a little less clear, and No Country For Old Men was obviously “blurry” in some spots.

So we increased the speed and watched some episodes of The Office last night. The conclusion? HD Netflix streaming totally rocks. Absolutely great. I really think online streaming is the way the future should go. No more discs, just streaming. Hopefully this happens, but we’ll have to have the Internet infrastructure for it to work.

So, what was our old speed? I ran by SpeedTest before the upgrade to see what it would register. It basically came up at 1.5 mbps download, where as we were paying for 3.0 mbps. I thought that maybe the site had a fluke or something, so I decided to wait for the 5.0 mbps to see what it would say about our connection then.

I figured if it came in at 5.0 mbps then Embarq had our account incorrectly configured. If it came in at 3.0 mbps then I would ask Embarq if they could verify we were indeed getting 5.0 mbps. And if it came in on some other odd number, like 2.5 mbps, then I would disregard its results entirely. It came in at 5.0 mbps.

So I’ve got to get ahold of Embarq and yell at them because we were probably running 1.5 mbps for quite some time, the entire life of the account since we’ve been in the new house. That may net us a decent refund.

When they upgraded the line in the DSL box outside my house, they left a connection loose too, so I had to figure out why the phones and Internet were all out… Bastards. But I fixed it because I’m The Man. Haha.

I’m having trouble figuring out what to talk about today for my blog post. There’s not a whole lot on my mind right now that I feel like posting about.

I already talked about Watchmen… And it’s sticking with me. Sometimes media will stick with me after I’ve “consumed” it, be it movies, books, music or video games. When I say sticking with me, I mean it kind-of takes up a temporary residence in my memory. Spoiler Alert Like the scene in Gears of War 2 where Dom finds his wife and basically has to kill her because she’s been broken by torture, that stuck with me for about a day End Spoiler Alert. So Watchmen has stuck with me for a bunch of reasons, be it the story, the romance between two characters… Even the graphic novel stuck with me.

I can’t talk yet about the photo shoot that Laura and I did last night for Project: FH – March 2009. Although you can preview it a little with this post on her blog. The final result of that shoot will be awesome.

I did see No Country For Old Men the other day on my XBox 360 via Netflix. It was a good movie, but the ending wasn’t quite what I was looking for. But oh well, it’s a Cohen brothers’ movie.

Let’s see, what to talk about… I think I’m going to get a wireless bridge for the entertainment center downstairs, that way I can network all of the devices there to our wireless network. Our wireless router sits upstairs and I’m not running cable all the way down to network, so a bridge will suffice. Want to get coach lights and bar lights for the house sometime soon… Blu-Ray player and home theater PC eventually…

I wouldn’t mind getting Street Fighter IV either, as well as The Lost and the Damned expansion for GTA IV. I’ve chewed through a good deal of my Christmas video game haul thusly:

1. Beat Fallout 3
2. Guitar Hero: World Tour play continues on
3. I’m done with Need for Speed Undercover
4. Not done with Dead Space, but it’s intermittent when I play for various reasons (creepiness indeed!)
5. Defeated Gears of War 2 campaign and have moved on to online play (Horde mode FTW)

I’ve got some other XBox Live Arcade games I’m in the middle of a bit too:

1. Braid, I’m a few worlds in on this one
2. Portal, I want to start doing some of the challenges

Well, there’s a recap for you.

Oh, and I tried to make an artistic look at my Zoolander photo from Project: FH – February 2009. I couldn’t make one work very well, there’s too much detail that needs to be kept from the original photo to make it work. Sorry Katie & Sarah!

Ok, so remember my post recently about certain things in video games being too hard? I posted it two days ago.

Well, last night, before I started watching the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels eventually lose to the San Diego State Aztecs, I decided to load up Need For Speed: Undercover again and play a bit. I played some of the races and farted around randomly. Then I decided, just for shits and giggles, to try that one job again.

Hm… Now that’s interesting… One try and I defeat it… All while barely taking any damage to the car…

Well, I can tell you the one thing I did differently than the other times was I actively seeked out racebreakers, which are points in the city that you race in that can be activated in some manner to cause roadblocks and disable police cruisers. You usually activate them by smashing into one part connected to them, such as a weak beam for an overpass.

So maybe it wasn’t quite as hard as I thought it was… It was still damn irritating when I couldn’t beat it though.