So i am watching the episode last week and this old woman makes her dramatic return and I can not remember who or what she was. It was it turns out an old character. Eloise Hawking.

The Eidos Rescue Plan: Naked Lara Croft?

No more? Over on tombraiderforums.com, a poster believed to be (but not confirmed as) "Tomb Raider: Underworld" creative director Eric Lindstrom says future Lara Croft games may go for a "Mature" rating.

The Teen rating meant we couldn’t do things we wanted to or were done in the past, but it was a publisher mandate at the tmie [sic]. It won’t always necessarily be so, though, the future can always be different.

Shares in Eidos rose 8% in morning trading.

Sex sells, and finally Lara Croft will be sexy. Well okay, she’s always been sexy.

Stargate :Atlantis ends much like Stargate: SG-1 ended, with a titanic battle right in front of Earth involving Zero Point Modules, Atlantis, and weapons platforms.

And now we have the launch of Stargate: Universe which is, apparently, a remake of StarTrek: Voyager and Space: 1999.

Like Voyager a terrible science experiment brings the crew to the outer edge of the universe. Like Space: 1999 the ship can not be controlled.

I am worried that this will be a fiasco much like Voyager was a fiasco. 

But I long to be proven wrong.

Wow. this is nothing short of amazing. I will say I played super mario twice, this game I played a lot. And was the reason I bought the Wii.

Well, that didn’t take long.

According to game-tracking website VGChartz, sales of Nintendo’s pop-culture phenom Wii Sports have surpassed those of legendary platformer Super Mario Bros., making the breakout Wii title the best-selling video game of all time. And it only took two years and two months to do it.

The data is based on cumulative worldwide sales figures ending the week of December 27, 2008, which indicate that lifetime sales of Wii Sports have exceeded Mario’s staggering 40.24 million units.

Shocked? Don’t be. Unlike most video games that can be bought at retail, Wii Sports comes bundled with the Wii hardware in every territory other than Japan and Korea. In other words, if you bought a Wii, you bought Wii Sports whether you liked it or not (chances are, you liked it). With over 45 million Wiis sold worldwide to date, it’s only logical that Wii Sports would start smashing records sooner or later.

WII SPORTS: RESORT SCREENS

And before you brand Wii Sports a false champion due to being bundled with hardware, consider that Super Mario Bros. was also sold as a bundle with the original Nintendo Entertainment System during its mid-80’s heyday. Plus, Wii Sports has been a major hit even in non-bundled form, topping Wii sales charts in Japan at over 3.2 million copies sold in 2008 alone.

A new version of the game, Wii Sports: Resort, is due out later this year.

Wii Sports is best-selling game ever – Video Game Feature – Yahoo! Video Games

cross posted from eastmeetswest.krung.net

I find it ironic that I became a Habs fan in 1984 because of a goaltender who only played 91 games in his career. After all there were better reasons.

I moved to Montreal in 1973 at the age of one.

That year there was a Stanley Cup parade. And there were four more by the end of the decade..

Starting in 1974 my mom worked at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. She had a long term parking contract at a lot that was across the street from the forum.

My mother and I must have walked by the forum dozens of times. And not once did it register to either of us that this was the Mecca of Hockey.

My elementary school gym teacher was Bruce Blake,

the son of Hector ‘Toe’ Blake. I mean, I was doing push ups, playing floor hockey, running with the son of a coaching legend, and I had no idea who he was. He was just the guy who made this slow, fat kid work out.

I started playing hockey at the age of 7. I mean sucked, but I still played. All my teammates imagined being

Guy Lafleur or Larry Robinson. All I wanted was to get off the ice and read a book.

My earliest memory related to hockey isn’t about a

Stanley Cup. It’s a front page article covering a car accident involving the great Guy Lafleur. I remember people being very anxious. I had no idea why. I thought he was a famous actor or a politician or someone important.

Neither the proximity to the forum, the Stanley Cup parades or the Great Guy Lafleur broke through my shell.

It was, of all people,

Steve Penny.

In 1984, the Habs sucked. Not sucked like they did in the late nineties or early part of the 2000’s. But they did suck relatively speaking. That was the first seasons since before my parents were born that they had had a losing season.

Late in that season, Jacques Lemaire became the head coach. It was an odd choice. Jacques had quit on Montreal to go become a coach in Switzerland. Apparently he wanted to be free of the Montreal press. While in Europe he learned of the neutral zone trap. A deadly, soul destroying defensive scheme that sucked the fun out of hockey. In 1983, no one knew what it was. And in fact, no one knew how to play the damned scheme.

But Jacques taught his team how to play this new style.

And by the time the playoffs rolled around, the team was executing the trap perfectly.

The Boston Bruins, who were at the time a great team, with players like Rick Middleton and Terry O’Reilly and

Pete Peeters were swept by the Habs. And after that all of Montreal had only one name on their lips: Steve Penny. And somehow that registered with me.

Before the playoffs he was a punch-line to a joke. Whose going to lead the Habs to the Stanley Cup? Steve Penny!

The improbability of a nobody playing that well was surreal. For a geeky kid, who sucked in sports, there was something almost mythic about that story line.

And then we beat the Quebec Nordiques in seven games. It’s funny now, but those were bitter rivalries. No, bitter is an understatement. Montrealers hated the Nordiques. We loathed their very existence. They had no right to claim any loyalties of any Quebecer. And yet they did. And so the series wasn’t just a series, it was a minor war.

And by then I was in love with this sport. A sport where some nobody could become mythic. It was like a fairy tale come true. The farm boy pressed into service by the king, saves the day and gets the girl. That was Steve Penny. That was hockey.

And by the time we met the Islanders I was hooked. At the age of 12 I had a 10ish pm bedtime. And now I was demanding that I be allowed to stay up until the game was over.  My parents were suddenly very worried. I, who had never shown any interest in any sport of any kind, was demanding he be allowed to stay up until the late hours of the night to watch the Montreal Canadiens play the New York Islander. They had no idea why I would care.

But we had a basement, so they allowed me this indulgence.

And we won the first two in New York. And by then, my dad was kinda curious to see what I was watching. But unfortunately midnite struck. And the magical run was over.

The Islanders figured out the lethal trap or maybe we stopped playing it, who knows.

But I was hooked.

After I bought my Storevault system, I discovered that the 6 year old powerline adapters from Netgear were no longer cutting it.

The bandwidth was okay but the latency blew chunks.

My first option was to get an improved version of the product. The problem with the improved version was that although bandwidth had improved and latency had improved, it was still too slow. For example, a ping revealed at least a 3 mS average.

My next option was to look at wireless networking and try and create a wireless bridge.

At first I was terrified by the fact that such technology did not seem to exist. I believed I would have to enter the realm of custom hacks etc.

But Netgear came to the rescue with their  WNHDE111 devices.

Now the good news is that the devices were very, very easy to put together and use.

The other good news is that I got the latency I wanted (1mS).

The bad news is that I can not seem to get reliable bandwidth. I can not seem to get more 15->18Mbit/Sec. Which is annoying because it means I can not stream HD video from a CIFS share. Given I have an HD capable camera, that is a major bummer.

Obvious issues are the distance (greater than 20 feet), and the intervening walls.

So i am not expecting full 300Mbsec. I am expecting approximately 100Mbits. And I don’t even get that.

My first thought was: oh well. But then I started to fiddle with the equipment and observed that I was able to get 100+Mbsec. But not consistently.

Another wasted Christmas 🙂

I decided that using my random thoughts blog to blog about hockey would hurt my cool and hip image.

So I have a new hockey blog:

http://eastmeetswest.krung.net

Sometimes, I will cross post ..