I’m glad to be back in Dallas, and I’m looking forward to the weekend. We got to our major milestone today at work, so I can rest easy over the weekend.
Last night I received my Logitech Harmony 880 Remote in the mail from OnSale.com and I am impressed. I’ve never had a stateful remote, which remembers the current state of the various electronic components and it is also able to operate at an “activity” level rather than the “fancy macro” level I’ve been slumming at with my current remote, the Home Theater Master MX500. My new remote even has a sleek recharging station and the software works on MacOSX. The only problem I had with the software was that it’s suppose to detect when a new config file has been downloaded, but this feature never seems to work. I’m pretty sure there’s a “Find Last Change” sort of API in MacOSX (Win32 had one). Anyway, I just double clicked the files and the programmer launched and took care of entering the data into the remote via USB.
On the gaming front, I’ve been renting Gran Turismo 4 from Gamefly. I know it’s supposed to be a *real* driving simulator, but, and maybe I’ve not been paying attention to my driving since I was 15, it doesn’t seem right. I’ve found it very difficult to pull off drifting (which is probably very hard in actuality) on the normal tracks. I also have found that it’s quite hard to just do a 180. Realistically if you are going down the road at 80 mph and cut hard and hit the parking brake, you’ll flip or break something on your car. In a video game I would expect that doing this manuveur would result in at least an uncontrolled spin. Neither happens. Instead of a spin or flip, the car just turns to the direction of the cut (but only up to about 100 off forward) begins sliding forward (slightly askew), and slowly rights itself back into the forward direction, though not completely. Maybe I’m playing with some safety mode on. If I continue to play these racing games on my plasma, I think I may invest in a driving wheel, since driving with a controller in most of these games is a little “wonky”.