3 Day Weekend!

I have to give props to whoever scheduled E3 and Memorial Day this way relative to each other. Just enough distance that stringing them TOGETHER into some road trip of unimaginable proportions is impractical - but still close enough that when you come lurching out of said post-E3 road trip you can just careen right into the holiday weekend.

Hope everyone had a good one - we didn't do a whole lot, but I'm basically back on my feet and ready to make a go of the summer. :-) The TV is all fixed up, the UberRemote(tm) has learned all of the new hardware codes, I found the secret trick to having two TiVos in the same room (more on that in a sec), I've caught up my Magic Online league, I cleaned up my den which had been pretty trashed with E3 and TV issues, and I picked up a copy of Disgaea over the weekend.

So a few stupid TiVo tricks of note. 1) If you look in the manual it's possible to set a "remote channel" so you can have two remotes, two TiVos, and each TiVo only talks to one remote. Then you can program those two separate remotes into an Uberremote if you have one. It's a pain, but it did work. 2) You can enable a "30 second skip" on any TiVo. Start playing a recording, and then press Select - Play - Select - 3 - 0 - Select. The TiVo will bong three times (if you have the sounds on), and the "next track" button (the one with a fast-forward symbol and a vertical line) will become a 30 second skip. It looks kind of like this >>|

As for the anticipated deluge of "why two TiVos", the answer is pretty much why not. We bought the NEW TiVo because it will record High Definition TV. The old TiVo still works just fine, so why not keep it around. They can record separate programs, and it's more disk space, so there you are.

Thanks go to Monte for pointing me at The Kingdom of Loathing, a web based online RPG kind of game. It's intentionally cheesy, it's funny, and it's free.

I like Disgaea so far - it's turn based tactical combat a la FF:Tactics or Advance Wars (much closer to FF:T because it's an RPG mechanic wrapped around the tactical combat gameplay. It's got a neat sense of humor, and the mechanics seem pretty novel and interesting. This is an old game, but it was pretty hard to find, and Atlus reprinted it last week, so I snatched a copy.

In case it's not obvious, I have a certain tendency to just mention games in passing. If somebody is curious about the title, just post a question and I'll be happy to babble in more detail. I'm also still playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong but it's gotten pretty tough. I have a tendency to play that in 5-10 minutes spurts and then move on to something else.