Then a few weeks ago, I get a call from my sister telling me that my dad, who had just been put on the heart transplant list a few weeks before, is getting a new heart. So I head out to Virginia to be there.

That Saturday, I get a call from our agent, Nalani Young of Northwest Prudential, who has been absolutely wonderful, telling us Wells Fargo finally approved our offer. That news, along with the transplant being a success, made for a great feeling.

So our closing is set for Sept 6th. Which makes for a VERY busy two weeks. We have PAX, then spend a week with my brother Brett in Cali, then back here to sign the papers.

I need that vacation. But the stress taken off our back waiting, is a relief. And knowing my dad is getting a second chance, is a blessing.

Thanks to everyone who has been supportive.

One thing I don’t have to work about anymore are my brothers. Both John and Brett are back. John is the one who had been injured by the IED during his deployment and just recently received a Purple Heart for that. He is still dealing with his injuries but his holding the faith that all will get better.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. Maybe I’ll get back into posting here more often when things sort themselves out. Until then, be excellent to each other.

I can feel myself starting to twitch, my feet crying out for me to stop already, even though I haven’t started.

Depriving myself of sleep, day after day, just to put on that shirt.

Being with like-minded friends and cohorts, who I get to see once, maybe twice a year.

What do I speak of? PAX of course!

If you’re going, see you there! But this time in Boston! New England baby!

Seriously, i’m excited. And I get to see a cousin of mine who lives out there. But I also feel like i’m going home. I haven’t been back to New England in years, and can’t wait.

-j

If you don’t, I had to put my beagle, Mabel, down. She had developed cancer some time ago and it finally got the better of her. We had her cremated and buried her at my parents house with one of their other beagles.

Christmas was good. Was helpful spending it with my parents, seeing my sister and two of my nieces and nephew. The trip coming back though was rather rough.

The storms wreaked havoc on many people’s travel plans. Including ours. Flights coming back home were cancelled, delayed, causing us to sleep in airports and take two days to get home. We were rather upset with Southwest’s policies. They do not give meal voucher’s, refunds, or hotel accommodations. The return trip tickets were put onto our accounts for use at a later date and they made a token apology by giving us both a $200 voucher, so that pays for our trip to Arizona for spring training and my trip to PAX:East.

And now we have a cat that has renal failure. Not looking forward to the that end.

/whine off

For those that have seen my twitter posts before or that have been over to our place, have seen that we’ve got a Kinect. I actually had it for awhile since I was quite lucky to be selected to be part of the beta test for it. And of course, there being a NDA, could not talk about it unless someone was here and played around with it.

But since its been out now for a few weeks, i’m more than free to talk about my thoughts.

Up until I got it a week before PAX, I was a bit skeptical. Things said about lag, motion capture, and it being a novelty, all sort of actually pushed me away from it since something like this really hadn’t worked in the past with other platforms.

But after hooking it up and playing around with it, I was hooked. Meg sat and watched the first few times, not really all that interested in it since she had her Wii. But after getting her to play around with Kinect Adventure’s (which comes with the retail Kinect), Kinect Joy Ride, and Kinect Sports, she was loving it. I think she said it best the first time she tried it while I was at work when she called me and said ‘OMG, this thing is kicking my butt! I’m totally tired now!’ It had given her more of a work out then the Wii ever did.

Rewinding a bit.

Setup was not all that hard, and maybe a bit exciting for me considering i’m a techno-geek, once I figured out a small issue since I didn’t read the instructions fully. Since I had the original Halo 360 console, I had to use the splitter that comes in the box to power the Kinect sensor, but if you have one of the new 360 Slims, it will be powered directly from the console.

After turning it on, doing some updates, and trying several times to get through the setup (remember that not reading the instructions part above?), I found that you must have the sensor’s USB connector plugged INTO the back of the 360, not the front ports. And it cannot go through a USB hub either. This is due to the amount of information transmitted back and forth and hub’s split the time between ports, this goes for the 2 front one’s as well. They’re not on a dedicated bus. But I got it up and running.

The tutorial does say 6-8 feet of distance, but I found that 8-10 feet was the sweet spot. Being at 6 feet caused the sensor to miss some things. This required us to move the couch back and the coffee table out of the way and moving one lamp for better lighting, but once that was done, things were good.

Joyride was the first game I played and it was alot of fun. Sports had some fun things in it, but it seemed a bit Wii-ish in characteristics. And when Adventure’s finally came around, I had so much fun playing it that I did not heed the warning about taking breaks. I suffered the next day with muscle’s I didn’t even remember having being rather sore. And during this time, I really saw no lag to speak of, the motion detecting at times was a little rough though. This required a quick recalibration since the sensor would be vibrated out of position a little from our ‘spongy’ floors. But overall the experience overall was enjoyable.

The voice recognition works surprisingly well and is a real convience to use when pausing a movie, sports viewing in the ESPN blade, or launching something. One thing, it doesn’t distinguish between players voices, so this might be a nuisance if too many people are calling out different commands while playing around. The one feature that is missing that they had talked about at E3 was the Xbox on/off. This was left out during development. And from an interview on Major Nelson’s podcast with Alex Kipman, he stated that would require the 360 and sensor to be using some power at all times, so it was opted to be left out.

The automatic sign-in works a majority of the time. Where I’ve done the Kinect ID 4 times or so, Meg’s only done it once or twice, and it shows. 90% of the time it recognizes me as long as the light is decent, and signs me in. But Meg has only about a 25% success rate. It does state though the more you do the connect ID in various lighting or time of day conditions, the more success it will have.

Overall, Meg and I really like it. I don’t see how it would work with FPS’s though, but with adventure and party games, its going to be great. This is actually a great product to get the whole family involved. It has something for everyone and gets you off the couch. And the friends and family that we have come over have enjoyed it themselves as well. A few even now owning it themselves. I can see our Wii now sitting unused except for the Netflix streaming on the TV in the bedroom.

On my brothers. At last contact, both are doing well despite the conditions and pick up in fighting over there. But the packages my family has been sending have been helping. I also ran across this back a month ago:

That’s my one brother, 1stSgt Jonathan Wyble. He was injured not to long ago in an IED explosion, and thankfully only received minor wounds and a stage 3 concussion.

Now back to trying to get rid of this damn cold. So until next time, be well.

This post was more to just vent and show how pathetically stupid customer support for the gaming industry really is (there are some exceptions).

So as I had previously posted, Brett is wanting to play Mafia II, but is unable to get it installed since he doesn’t have internet access except for email. Steam was absolutely of no help saying over and over ‘He will need to connect to the internet at a cafe or such to do it then.’ HELLO?!?! HE’S IN A GODDAMN WAR ZONE!!

And then there’s 2k Games.

Here’s my original email to them:

From: thejaxx@gmail.com
Date: 20/10/2010 02:50:37
To: usa@take2support.com
Subject: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia I

Name: David Wyble
Email: thejaxx@gmail.com
Platform: PC
Game: Mafia II

Question: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia II and emailed me with a problem. He can’t install it on his laptop due to no internet connectivity. Unfortunately they do not have internet access over there except for email through the Dept of Defense system and therefore cannot install the game. He still has approx 7 months left and asked me to help him out. If you want to email him directly with some suggestions or a way to help him out, his contact info is as follows: GySgt Brett Wyble – ************** Or please reply to me with something that may help. Thank you much.

Pretty clear I would think.

Well, three weeks later… Yes, three weeks, I get this response:

Dear David,

Before we look into your problem we require more information on the system you are running the game on. The best way to gives us this information is to attach your Direct X information to an email.

To do this – Start menu > Run > type DXDIAG > click Ok, this will then load the Direct X diagnostic tool. Once this has been done click on Save information and save the Text file on your PC.

Now reply to this email with the file attached and we will look into the problem and be back in touch as soon as possible.

Kind regards,
Matt

Technical Support

I have no words to describe my utter astonishment.

So if anyone know’s anyone at Valve or 2K or know’s how to help, please let me know.

Not sure why I said that. But who cares.

So, I had so much I wanted to do this summer, but only got some of it done. It was rather frustrating. Wanting to get some games played through, or watch shows, go camping, see movies, go to the zoo, etc. But something always came up. So only got a few of the things done. I think alot of it had to do with my back, meaning doctor appts, therapy, and resting it up.

Then there’s Ernie.

Ernie the Cat had taken ill, really badly, where she was urinating a lot of blood, running a high fever, couldn’t stand, and wouldn’t drink or eat. I ended up having to take her to the vet with the certainty that we were going to have to say goodbye. The vet asked us to give her 24 hours and gave her a pretty good dose of anti-biotics, fluids, appetite enhancer, and something else. Its now 3 days later and she’s doing better. I’m just not sure how much longer she’ll be with us.

And finally, been married now one year. And as much of an ass I am, she still puts up with me. :p

Lastly, as many of you know, I promote Child’s Play, which is ramping up shortly. I also ask you to take a look at this: Extra Life. Esmerelda from Sarcastic Gamer is trying to raise money for the Miami Children’s Hospital by playing games for 24 hours straight on Oct 16th. She’s not asking for much, just $1/hour. I’ve pitched in and ask you do the same.

Not much I can say about it that hasn’t already been published somewhere else, except to reiterate just how damn awesome this convention is. Getting see people I only talk with online, play games with, and occasionally speak with, is well worth the vacation time, the pain endured, and the bittersweetness of parting ways for another year.

But this time, it won’t be a year. Least for me it won’t, because I will be going to PAX:East. Yay!

So this year I was a Silver Assistant (Thanks PRD for giving me this chance <3). This entails me working closely with several exhibitors and helping out others and attendee's in the expo hall. All of my exhibitors were just friggin fantastic and I would like to thank each one:

Rooster Teeth: Gus, Geoff, Bernie, and the rest of you, thanks for gifts and not killing me for checking on you guys occasionally to make sure you were alright. You’ve been a barrel of laughs ever since I found you folks at my original PAX and look forward to the future.

Mega64: Rocco, Derrick, Shawn and Eric. You guys just plain out rock. And no, I didn’t forget Garrett, you sir, are just one crazy mofo. Thanks for being gentle with a first year SA and for the DVD’s. Look forward to the video you shot on the floor. And my wife loves you guys for helping her win one of the DSi’s.

Sweet Kitty: Thank you for the Yan Yan, the cookies, and the laughs. Meg thanks you for the Totoro pin, she gets the biggest grin on her face when I mention it. See you in the store soon!

Open Chord LLC: You’ve made me want to actually learn to play guitar now. The product you have developed is great and I would LOVE to get one. I had a blast the two times I actually had the time to play and know I will again soon. Good luck and hope to see you next PAX!

Fugazo: Frobots looks like its going to do well, I know we will be getting it as soon as it shows up on WiiWare. Hope to see more from you folks going forwards!

Art Institute of Seattle: Your video blew my mind. You have some very talented students and I just know I will see some of their work in future games.

A few things I am looking forward to from the show: The Old Republic, Kinect, Windows 7 Phone, Portal 2 (OMFG, hurry it up!!! :p ), Duke Nukem Forever (no joke, its coming, though it would of been classic if they would of said ‘psych!’ heh), Halo: Reach, TRON, and a few other items i’m missing.

I would also like to thank the folks that manned the Plantronics booth for their appreciation and understanding while I helped get their setup issue’s taken care of. It was a pleasure talking with you! And Lars, if you happen to somehow find this, if you guys get a headset that cups the ears, you’ve got a customer right here! Fell in love with my Voyager Pro the moment I bought it and have no doubt your headset would do the same.

And to Chinny Chuang of Zalman, pleasure helping you out and thanks for the smiles, they helped relieve the stress of the crowds.

And lastly, to my fellow Enforcers, we did it again. ELand kept us all alive! Love the hell out of you guys and see you all in the trenches again at PAX:East. And if I forgot anyone, my apologies, tired and it wasn’t intentional.

*UPDATE* I just realized that I owe a big thanks to SpyderZ, Zalvinar, and Ailadinya for their input and support for my first time in this position. Thank you so much.

John, currently there sent me this pic of himself from the combat camera:

Dusk

My youngest brother will be heading over there sometime shortly.

And if you know anyone over there, send them a care package. Include some powdered milk, its something they can use while out on patrols.