Those kids and their Wiis

I remember back to the late 80’s when I would play Super Mario Bros. with my friends. The one defining aspect of playing that game back then was that I would try to make Mario jump by jerking my controller up in the air. Of course this didn’t do anything, but it was just a natural reaction to playing the game. My mom did the same thing for years.

Fast-forward to today. My 7-year-old is just starting to learn to play video games. For the past few months, she’s enjoyed (or been frustrated by) games like Mario Kart Wii and other games where motion (such as jerking the controller up in the air) gives her the response she wants. Playing the Wii has been a bit unnerving for me, as I spent years of my childhood trying to unlearn the very sorts of actions that the Wii encourages. This has always come naturally to her.

A few days ago, I decided that it was time for her to learn how to play with my Nintendo DS. As the was playing “The New Super Mario Bros.,” I noticed that the motion that she’d become accustomed to (jerking the controller around) wasn’t working, and it was making her frustrated. When playing Mario Kart DS, she kept trying to turn her driver by turning the DS in the air… which, of course, doesn’t work. All in all, playing the DS was a frustrating experience for her after having played the Wii for so long.

After seeing her frustration playing those action-oriented games, I decided to let her try another game that I thought might hold her attention longer: Final Fantasy. Specifically, it was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Gameboy Advance. (FFA for PlayStation is still one of my favorite FF games.) I handed her the DS and let her play, warning her that there was a lot of reading involved, but that it might be more interesting for her. She started playing and I didn’t hear anything out of her for over 4 hours. Simply amazing. Her cousin came over yesterday, and they’ve been playing a LOT of Nintendo DS together.

So I suppose it was interesting to see the difference between her generation and mine. Or rather, the similarities. The biggest difference is that this time around, Nintendo allows people to jerk the controller around. I also think it’s interesting that my daughter couldn’t pay attention to the Mario games, but was able to hyper-focus when it came to playing an RPG. That sounds like my daughter.

Good News, Bad News

Good News: I just landed a new job with a medical equipment company called Stryker. I had a 3.5 hour interview with 6 people, but I feel that it all went extremely well. Apparently they felt so too, because I’m now contracting for them. Best of all, it only took me 7 minutes to drive there the other day which is much better than the 1 hour commute I was making before.

Good/Bad News: My best friend Eric is about to finish up Navigator training in the Air Force (if you’ve seen Top Gun, he’s Goose instead of Maverick). After nearly a year of training 1500 miles away in Texas (he and I are California natives), he just found out he’s getting stationed in Omaha, Nebraska. The good news is that it was his third choice of location (better than getting a 17th choice, I suppose) and that he’ll be flying in/out of London and other parts of Europe pretty frequently, which is something that he’ll really enjoy doing. The bad news is that even in Omaha, he’s still 1500-1600 miles away from home, and I just plain miss spending time with him like we used to. Phone calls and iSight video chats just aren’t the same.

Good/Bad News: After being retarded and waiting 6 years to get my wisdom teeth pulled, I finally went to an oral surgeon and got all 4 wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. The good news is that I no longer have to worry about my wisdom teeth coming in directly horizontally causing very painful impacted molars (I’ve been taking Tylenol every day for the past 3 weeks for the pain). The bad news is that even with my medications Toradol and Vicoden (which is a close relative to drugs like Morphine and Heroine), my mouth is still killing me. I’ve been sitting here eating ice cream with a package of frozen peas on my face all morning to little avail.

Bad News: We had to let our house go last week. With my being out of work for three weeks, we weren’t sure how soon I’d've been able to find something else considering how competitive the market has been lately here in Silicon Valley. So we signed the “Release of Contract” documents last week, and are currently planning to wait a few months to be sure we’re financially stable again and then start looking for a new home. The lease on our apartment is over in August, so we’ll ideally need to find something else by then. Here’s hoping everything goes well with that.

Good News: For my fellow geeks that are as excited to start using the next version of Tarzan as I am to release it, I just want to say that I’m close to finishing development on the brand-new, completely overhauled Tarzan Control Panel. Besides the new features that I talked about the last time I mentioned Tarzan here, I’ve added the ability to apply custom descriptions to items via the Control Panel, and I’ve also added advanced cache management options — specifically the ability to recache the image/data for a given item without having to FTP into your cache folder and try to discern which item is which. I’ve also begun building the API that will allow people to search for items based on keyword rather than just ASIN/ISBN numbers. It should also be noted that I’ve completely overhauled the caching system in Tarzan 1.2, and you’d have to be Forrest Gump to not notice the significant speed gains that this new system has allowed. This same caching system (as well as a few other Tarzan features) will be making it’s way into the next version of SimplePie as well as Simple PHP Gallery 2 in the upcoming months.

Okay, I’m done writing now. I think it’s time to take my frozen peas into the living room to try to finish up Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Ryan: Slacker No More

Two and a half weeks?! Ryan, that’s just no good. What’s your deal, man? Why are you being suck a slacker?

This is the obligatory “Sorry, I’ve been busy” post as made famous by Dan Rubin, Todd Dominey, and Adam Polselli.

Every time that I’ve come across something cool lately, my boss has handed me another 5 hours of work that is due in three. Everytime, I’ve gone to work on Feed Parser, or Blocker, or Blogroller, my wife says “Time for dinner!” Everytime I’ve gone to sit down and experiment with unexplored features of CSS (for my upcoming redesign with the Longhorn-esque timeline), I realize that if I don’t leave right away, I’ll miss my train and be late for work.

Weekends haven’t been that much better either since I’ve either been out of town or watching my friend’s kids for a few hours while they’re at work, or I’ve been trying to get through disc 1 of 3 in Final Fantasy VII.

I’ve got to figure out how to re-work my schedule so I’ve got a little more room. Spending over 3 hours a day either on or waiting for the train as been a huge loss of time. Of course my iPod and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for GBA-SP have helped the boredom issue, but I’ll be able to do more once I can finally afford to get my laptop.