I finished college at an accelerated rate. Not surprising, since I was a century or two ahead of all the professors. I began graduate school. But I was bored there, too. I had a job writing software for primitive human computers. It was the 1980s on Earth and humans were just beginning to understand computers. I met a lot of humans who were working in the computer field. My human friend Bill used to come over to my room and we would exchange ideas. It was hard for me to simplify my knowledge enough for him to follow. Everything had to be explained in simple human terms, using words like "windows" to explain a childishly simple concept. And my human friend Steve thought it was a huge breakthrough to use symbolic icons and a simple pointer rather than a lot of complex language.

• Excerpt from The Andalite Chronicles, by Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul...

So there you have it folks. It was an Andalite who invented the concept of a windows-based graphical user interface, and it was Microsoft and Apple who copied HIM. We can all stop pointing fingers, saying Microsoft copied Apple, or Apple copied Microsoft. One great mystery of the digital world is solved!

I should have seen this coming. Most people (the ones with decent heads on their shoulders) were reassured by the latest announcements by Nintendo. Finally, we have some answers to long standing questions! But, of course, you're getting a flurry of negative sentiments. Probably the death throes of those PlayStation fanboys. (Yes, believe it or not, Sony still has fanboys.) I'm going to give my opinions on the latest whining I've seen:

• The Wii will cost $249.99 US dollars.

Believe it or not, people are whining about this. As I said in my last post, Nintendo only said "no MORE than $250", but people started taking it too far and predicting their own utopian prices, going so far as to predict a $150 price point... and they got angry when it wasn't. Nintendo didn't lie to you! Why ARE you angry? It's not priced competitively? They just lost you as a customer? What are you going to buy instead? Xbox360 Core System(which isn't worth buying, and everyone knows it) is $299, the Platinum System is $399. PlayStation 3 "Lite" is $499, and the PlayStation 3 "Fat" is $599. Elementary, my dear Watson. 250 is clearly a lower number than 599. $250 isn't competitive? Which planet are you from?

• The controller sets will cost $59.98 US dollars.

I agree with people here, though. To an extent. The controller is the hot tamale, the core of the Nintendo experience. Never before done, will be copied from this point on. It's a landmark in gaming history, and quite the technological breakthrough. Get the point, yet? I really didn't expect it to be cheap. Did you? It's the Wii Remote! While I was expecting maybe $40 for the entire controller set, I'm not entirely surprised. (In fact, in hindsight, I should have known $40 was too cheap.) I'll just slowly collect controllers over time. I don't need all four at once, and remember! These things are built for portability. Nintendo's designed these things to be carried with you. When you go to play at someone's house, you're going to take your controller with you, since it's saved all your sensitivity settings. People won't need to buy controllers for people who will already have one.

• Virtual Console NES games will cost $5.

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine. I don't even know where to start here. You don't think NES games are worth $5? How much would you pay for one on eBay? I've sold a Legend of Zelda for over $20. Granted, you won't have the original cartridge, but I'm sure it will be nearly the same. Nintendo strikes me as the people who will get game downloads right. I will easily pay $5 to play old games on my Wii. I probably won't buy the games I have already, but there are still several games I want that I don't have the original cartridges for. I'm sorry, but you whiners are stretching it for this. Let me guess, you wanted it to be $1 a rom. Maybe 10 for $8? 20 for $15? How much are you expecting to pay for Sony for their game downloads? I'll wager it's nowhere near 5 bucks, the cost of a good hamburger from some fast-food joint.

• Wii Photo Channel and Photo Manipulation

I guess good ol' Joystiq got their hopes up on the Photo Channel for some reason. Whining about how it doesn't pass off as a good manipulation platform. Well, DUH! It looks to me like it was more of a slideshow feature, with basic manipulation functions, rather than a Photoshop for Wii. Looks like they're grasping at straws here, personally. A gigabyte of space isn't enough for hosting photos? What? Since when? I've got a digital camera. You can store about 600 very nice quality photos in about a gigabyte of space. Oh, but you said less than a gig. Okay, 500MB? Is that good enough? 300 photos. It's not like the Wii is going to be used to take panoramic photos or anything! Are you going to STORE photos on the Wii? The photos don't even have to be very big unless you're viewing them on an HDTV. I got the message that it was just a little photo kiosk that you could put your favorite pictures on to show your friends, and you can get silly with all the manipulation features.

• November 19 Release Date, two days after the PS3.

People are whining about this, as if it somehow affects them. Maybe, for once, they're feeling something for Nintendo and not themselves... I doubt it. Anyway, to the point. The PS3 is scheduled for November 17, with 400,000 units available in the United States. If you ask me? By the time Nintendo releases the Wii, there won't be any PS3s left and everyone left will remember the sheer awe that is Nintendo Wii, and get that instead. Especially after seeing the gargantuan inflated prices on eBay and resell stores. This is, of course, assuming that Sony can keep this release date and not push the entire system back to March 2007, like half of it already is. Do we trust Sony? No? Then what is there to worry about, exactly? In my not so humble opinion, the Wii going head-to-head with the PS3 is no problem for Nintendo. Sony should be shaking in their bullet-ridden boots. (Seriously Sony, watch it with that gun. There are only so many times you can shoot your feet.)

• No built-in DVD playback.

Oh my! Zee world hast ended! Primarily a gaming system, people were wanting the Wii to have DVD playback. Uhm... why? Your desktops have DVD playback, your laptops have DVD playback, your TV has DVD playback already. Why did the Wii need DVD playback, exactly? The Xbox didn't. I'm sure the Xbox360 doesn't. (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure. I'm just going off Microsoft's past.) "But the PlayStation 3 plays them!!" Yes... yes, it does. Because it's primarily a Blu-Ray/DVD player and a gaming system second. Nintendo is the opposite. There's always the future option of buying a USB attachment to play DVDs, but, for now, Nintendo doesn't want that. I'm okay with that, as you should be. Just because "everyone else is doing it" doesn't mean everyone should. It'll add nothing to the Wii, and people don't need a 17th DVD player.

So there you have it!

Finally, after months and months of waiting and grabbing at any and every scrap of Nintendo news that comes across the internet, they've finally announced the release date and price point, as well as a few more insights into just what the Wii can do, and what the packages comes with.

Nintendo's Incomparable Wii Console Launches Nov. 19; MSRP $249.99 (nintendo)
Live from New York -- It's the Wii Conference (1up)
Wii cuts up the Big Apple (gamespot)

As you can see, it's scheduled for release in North America on November 19th, just in time for holiday purchases, and the suggested retail price is about $250. A little more expensive than I thought it would be, but compared to the Playstation 3 at $600 and the Xbox360 at $400? It's definately the best deal on the market. (Personally, I want an Xbox360, but I'm going to wait until Halo 3 is released. I'm going to try to acquire a Playstation 2, also, for a couple games, but I'm not going to get it new, and I'm not paying more than $75 for it.)

Of course, you're getting people who've been predicting a $200 price point for so long that they've begun to believe it, and now they're all hopping mad that "Nintendo said less than $250, and they do $249.99, the jerks!" The morons. Look, Nintendo said no MORE than $250, and everyone else took that far too liberally and predicted as low as $150 for crying out loud, and now they're upset that it's $250, and that it's too expensive and not competitive. What?! Not competitive?! Compared to what? The Sega Genesis? Luckily, there's enough level-minded people out there to put those whiners in their place and laugh at them for me.

There are going to be 4 million units shipped worldwide by the end of the year, with the majority being shipped to the United States, so Nintendo says that finding one won't be a problem. (Compared to 500,000 worldwide Playstations 3s, hahahahaha!!! Nice job, Sony!)

Wii Sports is going to be included in the package you're going to buy. Which, in my opinion, is perfect! I was going to get it anyway, because it's a neat little game that showcases everything the Wii can do, but now it's just coming in the package. The packages also comes with one Wii remote and nunchuk attachment, which was pretty much expected, but we were hoping for more than one. Additional Wii remotes will cost $40, and the nunchuck attachments will cost $20, and, obviously, sold separately. Not really happy about that... kind of expensive for a complete controller.

They also announced something they call Wii Channels. Currently, they have a channel for news articles, a channel for personal photos, a channel for making little avatars (for I don't know what, yet... probably to design characters for Wii Sports, for one), a channel for browsing the web, and a channel for WEATHER. Worldwide weather. On your TV. I don't know about you, but the weather channel sounds awesome! People have been pointing out that the Playstation 3 and the Xbox360 are both designed for more of a complete media center instead of just games. Playstation 3 is more like a useless computer you connect to your TV that happens to play games (bias? me?), Xbox360 is more of a game system that happens to do computery things, and then there's the Wii. Not a whole bunch of pointless junk. Primarily a ground-breaking gaming system with a pinch of miscellaneous gizmos to have infinite fun with. Nintendo in a nutshell.

So there you have it, folks. Save up your money and buy one come November! Hey... buy two!

So I installed Windows Vista Release Candidate 1. I must say that it's definately tons more stable as compared to Beta 2, but mostly because drivers are being built a little better. (Which is the fault of nVidia and Creative, no Microsoft.)

Aero seems to run full power just fine, as usual. This time, installing the videocard drivers didn't render the entire OS a blank screen... almost as if it was piping video through TV-out, but I tried using that and it was blank, too. Very stumped over that, but RC1 seems to cure that.

The volume control weirdness seems to be a bit more conventional than in Beta 2. It still has a per-application slider system, but, this time, you can control the master speakers. Unless that was something added with the new Audigy drivers, which actually work!! I'm impressed.

I really have no idea what everyone's whining about. Vista is running XP-solid for me, and I'm very, very happy with it. It still has that User Account Control dealy. That thing that'll pop up when programs try to automatically do things. People complain about that, but they must be too dumb to notice that you can shut it off. It'll be handy when tracking down spyware junk and trojans and such. Leave it off by default, then, if you think you're having spyware problems, turn on UAC and it'll pop up for every program trying to do things. I personally find it very handy.

Anyway... yeah. It works for me. I'm going to try to stay using Vista for a while now. See how it stands up to my daily desktop usage. (It's not installed on my laptop, yet... laptop has some mission critical things I can't chance problems with.)

Okay, people are bugging me to post... as if most of the people bugging me to post actually post regularly themselves, hoho. I keep telling you there's nothing worth posting about, but you keep bugging me anyway. So, okay! Fine! Prepare to read a very boring post!

So what have I been doing? Reading books, reading the omnipresent articles of Sony's impending doom, playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, listening to Weird Al music (king of parodies, a genius... this guy is cool), dabbling in the Orc side of World of Warcraft, working eBay.

I might start maintaining my church's website. No, you can't have the address. Not going to let random people go to the site and call the numbers and ask who made the website. So unless you're a friend of mine, don't bother!

I might start making a website for the guy I do eBay stuff for. Maybe. Seems he thinks I'm up to the task and has started asking me how to do things. Funny, I don't recall ever telling him I do websites for jobs. *coughDAD?cough*

There are 13 minutes left in the new Windows Vista RC1 download. I never got a code sent to me, but I read that you can use Beta 2 codes with it, so I might as well try it. I mean, technically, I'm in the Customer Preview Program, and I aced their little product awareness poll, so it's not like I'm doing it illegally. I accidentally asked for two Beta 2 codes, so I'm going to use the one I hadn't activated. I was picked for testing out the Pre-RC1, which they say was limited to only 100,000 users. I never installed that, though. Forgot about it, actually. But I've heard good things about RC1, so I'm going to try it.

Of course, there's a bunch of morons out there who are belly-aching about random junk about Windows Vista, but, lemme tell ya', I haven't exactly got the most current desktop system on the planet, and it runs Vista perfectly fine... with the exception of soundcard driver problems, but that's Creative's fault. Honestly, who waits 12 months to release drivers?

Speaking of Creative, I bought an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook for... my notebook. It's got high ratings from several different sites. I got a nice deal on one off eBay. I planned on buying this new with my notebook, but I needed it as cheap as possible at the time, and the soundcard upgrade wasn't important. I'd forgotten about it, actually, until I listened to music and sounds on my desktop again... and, uhm... yeah. I learned just how awesome Audigy's are.

I was going to buy it from Creative's store at first, because I wanted the warranty, just in case. But then I saw that they were "arranging their warehouse" and orders could be delayed up to 21 days. I decided to give them a chance anyway and placed an order. But then, after a week, they still hadn't sent it, and I was inadvertantly reminded of what happened last time I ordered from them.

It was back in the days of dialup. My modem got fried by lightning, so I was without internet access. Or... if I recall correctly, I had my old laptop. You know the one... AST Ascentia J20. 28MB RAM, 500MB harddrive space, external CD drive, 100mhz plain ol' Pentium, 9600bps modem. It was painfully slow to get the Creative Modemblaster ordered... and then they charged my card... and I waited... and waited... and waited... and then we called them and asked what's up, and they told us it was shipped a long time ago. We told them it wasn't here, and they said there wasn't anything they could do about it, and then we hung up after a few choice words. Then, a few hours later, I guess the manager of the salesman called us back and told us they'd get a new one out ASAP.

That one arrived in a couple of days. Then, about a month later, the first one showed up in this horrible looking box. It was obviously lost and it was a miracle that it arrived at all. We called Creative again and told them the first one came and we'd send it back... but they never, ever responded. So when the second modem (which we were using) got fried by lightning, too (I have bad luck with dialup modems), I used the modem that got lost.

Then, after we got DSL, the lost modem was fried by lightning, also... man, I have horrible luck with dialup modems.

Well, Vista's done downloading... so I'm going to burn that to a DVD. Bye!