Media Center: Proven that I need all 3 (PS3, XBox360 and NetBook)

I have 3 devices that take the role of  media center.  There were times when I thought it was kind of overkilling, but the experience I had in the last several days taught me that I need to keep all 3 of them.

• XBox 360 is the ONLY device that allows me to both watch and manage HDTV recorder by the machine in the closet.
• PS3 is the only device that can play Bluray disc in my home.
• NetBook with XBMC is the only device that can play pretty much ALL the files without hicup.  XBox360 and PS3, on the other hand, gives me strange results when playing mkv and other formats.

The O!Player is the one that I kind of regret getting now that I look back, which explains why I haven't turned it on for months.

Starting to use Asus Slate as primary machine

For a while I wasn’t too happy about the Asus Slate, mostly because of the terrible Windows 7 Touch API, the less than perfect stylus calibration, and the lame battery life.  In fact, I spent a whole day today try to accept this machine as my daily usage machine in order to lure myself into spending more time to code touch using this machine.  The effort seems to be working, and now I am starting to use it to check mail, write blog and do sketch ….  which is kind of weird that I have to FORCE myself to enjoy something I spent money to buy,

Water melon and being a sucker

I went to HEB to do grocery shopping a while ago, and I saw water melon.  And suddenly I had an urge to buy one, probably because of the hot weather makes me start imagining how cool it will be to eat a piece of ice cold water melon.  So I brought one at US$4.99.  Then I went to Goldcn SuperMarket at China town to buy rice, and found that water melon was selling at US$1.99, and buy one get one free! 

Feels like a super sucker ... but ... how can price is SO DIFFERENT?

Happiness per minute ration

For the sake of testing something, I turned on my Wii again, which hasn't been touched for a while. And then, I realized that compares with all my other gaming devices (PC, Mac, PSP, NDS, 3DS, PlayStation 3, XBox 360, iPad, iPod Touch, Android), I still found Wii gives the biggest joy per minute ratio.

So why am I getting this XBox 360 again?

So I got this new XBox 360 4Gb edition when I got the new Windows 7 Tablet.  Besides having to find some time to set it up (which I still don't), I probably should get at least one game just to try the system out, which leads to an interesting revelation: there is no game that I really hungry to play on XBox 360.

It was right after the Sunday service practice today, I was about to head home, and then suddenly I was thinking: maybe I should go to BestBuy and check out what game I might be interested in for XBox 360.  After spending a while checking around, I found none.  Like, none.  No game got my interest.  XBox 360 is so flooded with FPS.  But I am more interest in games that is either more innovation on design, JRPG or old school platform.  I found none.

Not satisfied by the result, I went to GameStop, and I found a few old XBox 360 game titles that I might enjoy, but I just don't have an urge to buy them right away.

Finally, I went to the RedBox kiosk, and checked to see if there's any interesting XBox 360 titles.  There's only 5 titles avilable, and I was interested in none.

Awful.  So ... .who did I get the XBox 360 again?

Finally completed the AnyTime Upgrade for Windows 7

So in my last blog I was saying that I was still in the middle of upgrading Windows 7 from the given Home Premium edition to Ultimate edition.  It turns out that the upgrade being triggered was indeed Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update.  After SP1 installed, reboot, the Ultimate edition upgrade was completed.

However, the battle is not over yet.  After Ultimate edition upgrade, there were some more additional update going on, and I still could not see the Traditional Chinese handwriting support showing up on the Optional Update screen... until after multiple update and reboot.  And now I finally see the Traditional Chinese input option.  So I would assume that once I did it, I will finally get what I originally started the update for.

BTW, Microsoft really need to make the softkeyboard bigger.  If my Asian tiny finger has hardtime using the softkeyboard to enter password, imagine how a regular big American finger does on that keyboard.

Using Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade ... Not working ... But still trying ...

Up until now, whenever I encountered a new machine with anything less than a Windows 7 Ultimate edition, I would wiped the machine clean, and then install Windows 7 Ultimate edition from scratch.  Recently I purchased a Asus Eee Slate (Windows 7 based tablet) for development purpose, and since it was brought from Microsoft store with "Customized with Microsoft signature", I wanted to try out the user experience and see if Microsoft could improve the out-of-the-box experience by getting rid of crapware and tune the machine properly (which is what the Signature initiative supposed to do), so I haven't wipped clean the machine yet.  So far my experience with Signature is just lukewarm, with pretty darn negative feeling about the OS plus all additional software taking about half of the harddisk space.

But once again it comes to the time when I realized that there are features I need but not provided by Windows 7 Home Premium edition, namely the Traditional Chinese handwriting input.  So here comes my journey of upgrade the Windows 7 Home Premium edition to Ultimate edition.

Before I can perform the upgrade, I need to connect the tablet to the Internet, so I did all the WiFi connection preparation work.  After then I started the Windows Anytime Upgrade , entered my Windows 7 Ultimate edition product ID, and then followed a few on screen instruction, and seeing the machine starting to get online and attempted to do the upgrade.

It failed.  And I was like "what the hell".  So I tried it again, still failed.  And so I rebooted the machine, tried it again, and still failed, but this time there's some new Windows Update going on at the back, which was odd since I always spent hours yesterday to perform Windows Update to make sure that the machine has every single update applied.  My guess is that the Windows Anytime Upgrade triggered some new updates.  Still the update is still going, I might as well leave it running, and see if I have better luck later.