Just a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to in my “spare” time, is the weekend before last I attended Boise Code Camp. I didn’t have time to fully prepare my presentation, so I just attended this year rather than presenting a half-finished talk. I attended several sessions on robotics and physical computing, and they all pointed in one form or another to the Arduino microprocessor development platform. It is a very cheap but powerful method to of getting started playing with digital circuitry and interfacing a PC to the physical world. I went ahead and ordered one myself, so expect some projects to start appearing here soon.

Work was spent getting all of my loose ends tied up in preparation of being gone this week. Thank you to everybody who has allowed me to concentrate on my family right now rather than worrying about what is going on at work.

I’ve watched a couple things on the TV after getting home in the evenings from the hospital. I’ve needed something to do while doing nothing, and a good movie is a good way to do it. Mythbusters is back on, as is South Park, and I watched the movie Walking Tall.

Anyway, that is just a quick update on what is going on in my world. Makayla has been cleared to go home today, so as soon as the doctors get done with all the discharge mumbo jumbo we’ll be headed that way.

All I had to do was think back and remember trying to play games online in other free networks (such as Delta Force 2 on the PC,) and I’m glad they charge a small fee.  It adds just enough deterrent to keep people from being complete jerks.  When people don’t have to pay, they have no incentive to play nicely.  They can register a free account, then wreak havoc by cheating, shooting team members, using vulgar language, and just general bad behavior.  They are then free to switch back to their other account and play without anyone knowing any better.

With the Xbox Live, you have to be a paying subscriber to play online, and it is per identity, called a gamertag.  Therefore if you want to jump online for a bit just to upset people, you’d have to register a new gamertag and pay to upgrade it to a gold account.  They have free 30 day trials, but they limit that to 3 per console (life time) so it can’t be abused more than a couple of times at the most.  Of course they could use their single gamertag they’re paying for, but there is a decent reputation reporting system so they wouldn’t be able to play with people any more.

My only remaining beef with it is that you can’t register more than one gamertag per Live account.  Since we only have one console, my wife and I will never be able to use our accounts simultaneously.  It seems like quite a waste for both of us to have to pay the yearly fee in order to build our own friends list and statistics.  I wish they would do like Everquest and World of Warcraft and allow a limited number of gamertags under the same account.  That way a family could have one membership and cover everybody.  The way it sits a large family would pay more per year than the purchase price of the console if all of the kids had their own accounts as well.

I’m now anxiously awaiting the Gold subscription keys to arrive that came with some accessories I ordered.  With as much entertainment value as we’ll get out of them, they are worth their weight… in gold.