Hardware Geeks

Rondo of Swords is turn-based strategy game for the Nintendo DS that was developed by Success and published by Atlus, who has also released other turn-based strategy RPGs on the Nintendo DS such as Luminous Arc.  Rondo of Swords, however, takes a slightly different tack than most grid-based strategy games by changing one of the fundamental elements of battle - rather than walking up to an enemy and smacking the daylights out of him, your characters are now required to use the “route maneuver system” to pass through both allies and enemies in the name of gaining bonuses and dealing damage (to the respective parties, of course).

Before I discuss the particulars of this game, however, I have a confession to make.  I can’t finish this game.  Despite the fact that my game timer only records my having played approximately sixteen hours, I am quite sure that I have spent in excess of thirty hours playing this game.  How is this possible, and is this a good thing?  Read on to find out.

Right now I am in the Berlin Conference Center where HP will be annoucing over 50 products. I will update this post with pictures and video so keep an eye on this entry,

Right now at 10:51 am Berlin time, Todd Bradley talks Business with Cherno Jobatey.

Todd says the growth HP has experienced over the years, he also believes youth is a driving force in technology and virtualization is a big part of the future.

11 am Berlin, Satjiv Chahil introduced. Tidbit about Satjiv, his dad is an olympic gold medalist in field hockey.

Tedd Clarked introduced at 11:05, and is now showing off 6 new consumer notebooks and 10 business notebooks, pictures coming later today. 

HP has officially announced that compaq is the low end brand. 

Today, Japan saw its worst crime to the day in the last seven years.  Tomohiro Kato, a 25-year old auto worker, drove a rented truck into a busy intersection in Tokyo, taking down as many people as he could with the truck before he proceeded to jump out and stab every random pedestrian in reach before police overwhelmed him at gunpoint.  My sincerest condolences go out to the families and friends of those who lost their lives in this killing spree, but it irks me to see that gaming can be tagged as the (il)logical primary reason for homicidal behavior on both sides of the Pacific.

Edit: BBC News has a much more level-headed article citing possible trends in Japanese society that could have contributed to Kato’s choice of actions.

We finally have a winner for our HDX system, and before I announce the winner I wanted to say that there were a lot of great entries and it really came down to technicalities and bonus points.

I have a trip to Berlin today for an HP event, they are announcing a lot of products and because my Flight leaves today I stayed up all night going over entry after entry after entry. Some made me laugh some made me sad.

The winner of our HDX system is Joe (BubbaByte) from Canada.

I would like to mention a few others whose entries in my opinion were great: rasim, KristopherWindsor, Slipflurry and so many more that I can’t even find them all in the thread.

The 2nd and 3rd place winners will be contacted after I return from Berlin.

Thank you everyone for Participating it was fun and hopefully we will do it again.

Recently our Datacenter caught fire, and well it would seem that VoodooPC.com is up in flames also. According to Rahul Sood Firefighters are on he scene and working the blaze as we type.

Could this perhaps mean something envylicious is coming from Voodoo next week sometime? Perhaps, Rahul told us to on his birthday that he won’t need a Macbook Air because something is coming soon. Since he didn’t need the Macbook Air he used it to cut his cake.

Yesterday, I was at the HP facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was briefed on HP’s offerings in the workstation space.

I went in to see what the offerings were with a view to finding out more information about the systems, and to see if they would pass muster, and become Logikworx’s recommended line of workstations, replacing our current line.

In a nutshell, I came away impressed.

Impressed with the range, power, pricing, and engineering that has gone into the HP workstations.

I was also shocked to find out that my engineering past had let to a tunnel vision as regards HP in workstations.

The contest is still going so submit your entries, we are trying to extend the deadline of the contest and I will post later on if we were able to extend it or not.

Why were we down? Well there was an explosion and fire at the Data Center where our server is located and this caused us to be down for nearly three days. Luckily no one was injured when the explosion occurred.

The site is still a bit sluggish and we expect it to be sluggish for the next day or so.

I am not much of a graphics or 3D artist, but I was able to test out this software called iClone, which basically allows you to create a 3D person and put it in different environments and then make a video.

What’s so cool about it, is that it does it all in real time, so you see your results immediately.

My friend who is a graphics artist actually tried out the software for me, and he was making video portraits of his entire family, and even created some for tutorials on a internal website for his job. (I’m trying to get one to show you)

I even tried the software myself and while I was not as good as my friend I was able to make a few videos of my friend Indi walking. (I love the view from the back)

I’m a techie buff and probably one of the few that have a Media Center PC in their living room.  While I love having it there because it saves me cable box rental and remote fees– I still need to rent a cable card.  The one thing I detest is the fact that I need a keyboard and a mouse for it to function correctly at all times.

Well no longer do I detest that, because Logitech gave me the diNovo Mini, a keyboard/touchpad designed for Media Center PCs.  What’s so great about it is it’s freakin’ like a Sidekick, and being that I used to be a Sidekick-aholic, using the diNovo Mini came easily to me.