Oh sweet Holy Batman! The Xbox Live Fall Update (due December 4th, 2007) will finally allow us to change the Windows Live ID that is associated with our Xbox Live Gamertag. Major Nelson has the details on this and also child IDs being able to 'graduate' and become adult IDs.

Basically, from Dec 4th we can decide what email address we want to use. This is huge for people like me who signed up for Xbox Live a long time ago using one email address, but use another email address for Messenger, Spaces, etc. This didn't really matter until Xbox started adding features like Messenger chat integration and releasing thumb keyboards to attach to your controller. Once those features were launched, I found myself unable to use those features due to the inability to use the email address that I wanted to.

On Dec 4th, on your Xbox Live Dashboard, go to Account Management --> Windows Live ID --> Change Windows Live ID.

So now, finally, I can change to the Windows Live ID that I want to use. Then I can start using Messenger on my Xbox 360, and I can have my Gamer Card on my Space! So come back next week and you'll see what games I've been playing, and the ridiculously few points and achievements I've managed to get!

The Gamerscore blog has details of other changes coming in the Fall update, in case you are curious. Streaming DIVX-encoded video from your PC to your TV via the Xbox, anyone? :-)

In honor of my new TV, which is due to arrive in less than 12 hours, I thought I'd show the TV commercials that Pioneer is running in the US for the KURO models. There are similar magazine commercials recently too. Can you tell I'm excited? LOL...

They are interesting commercials... very "artistic" to say the least. I particularly like the "Mouth" one, if like is the right word to use. I really don't think these commercials would make me want to go into a store to check out the Kuros, so from that aspect, their advertising budget has failed.

• Commercial 1: Mouth

• Commercial 2: Hand

• Commercial 3: Heart

Today is Thanksgiving. Tradition demands that vast numbers of turkeys be slaughtered and eaten in order that Americans can give thanks that they are fatter than anyone nation in the world, hold parades down Main St, and kick off the Christmas shopping frenzy and party season in style. Well, at least that's what it's all about for most people :-)

The turkey is actually native to North America, and have nothing to do with Turkey, the country. Despite not being a European bird, we also slaughter and consume vast quantities of turkey. The difference is that we do it at Christmas, since we don't have a Thanksgiving Day. Europeans have nothing to give thanks for, apparently.

And I'm quite sure Mr. Bean didn't have any reason to give thanks for this turkey incident, either. Be careful out there, the turkey may strike back!!

It finally happened to me - last night, during a game of Halo 3 crazy king on the Pit, my Xbox 360 console suddenly froze. (I was in first place in the game when this happened, BTW.)  Being knocked out of a game because of a system freeze is bad enough, but when I tried to reboot the console, it froze again during system startup, and a second reboot produced ... the dreaded red ring of death.

I now have a couple of options - ship it off and try to get it repaired (should take about 6 weeks to get it back!) or just go buy a new one. It didn't take me long to make my decision. Since I ordered my 60" Plasma TV the other day, I wouldn't mind having a 360 with HDMI output. I couldn't really justify buying a new one just to get a HDMI port on the back, but now that my current one is broken, I can buy a new one with a relatively clean conscience!

I joked with my wife, who was sitting next to me during all of this, that she would probably have accused me of deliberately breaking my console just to get a new one with HDMI output, especially since I'd just ordered my new TV 3 days ago. So I'm kind of glad she was a witness.

With HDMI, I can send video and audio to my receiver over a single cable, with better quality than my current Component video output and Optical audio cable. Considering I want to scale the picture up to my TV's native 1080p resolution, HDMI would be a definite 'good thing' to have.

The HDMI option first appeared on the black 360 Elite version, but has since made an appearance on newer versions of the Pro console (the white one with the 20Gb HDD) and the Halo 3 Special Edition (the green one with gold accents). If you're buying a white one with the 20Gb HDD, make sure that it has the HDMI output before you buy it. If it's been sitting in a store room for a while, it might not be new enough to have the HDMI output.

Anyway, I decided to buy a new one online from Circuit City, and I'll be picking it up from the store tonight on my way home from work. Soon I'll be back reveling in Halo 3 goodness :-)

We got up a little earlier than normal today and after checking the forecast, headed across the mountain passes to Leavenworth, WA, for a sausage and Christmas ornament shopping expedition. Yes, it is entirely possible to find both sausages and ornaments in the Seattle/Eastside area but it's not nearly as fun. Leavenworth is a Bavarian-themed town on state route 2, east of Steven's Pass.

I'm much more willing to part with my hard-earned cash if I've put in some effort first. Put me in a Christmas ornament shop close to home and I'll be pretty bored and grumpy at spending money on trinkets and baubles. But once I've driven through some seriously heavy rain for two hours, being infuriated by cars unnecessarily going under the speed limit on twisty mountain roads where it was difficult to pass them, and finally arriving in Leavenworth with a pounding headache, I wasn't about to skimp on anything. Oh no, now I simply had to buy enough things that made me feel as if the trip had been worth doing.

Leavenworth has a great Christmas store that's open year round (Kris Kringl), and it's always packed with delicate ornaments in various styles and price ranges. Certainly they have a ton of items which you would never find in the seasonal Christmas decorations aisles in Target or similar stores. In the end, we came away with 15 christmas ornaments to add to our tree, and 9 sausages (2 Polish and 7 "Country" sausages - a house specialty of the store we bought at).

Although this is just our second Christmas together, our collection of tree ornaments is doing very well this year. Last year things looked pretty barren, but this year we have enough to make the tree look decent. :-)  And yes, our tree is up and fully-decorated a week before Thanksgiving... not my choice but I know when to lose an argument ;-)

I bought my new TV today. Oh yes. Christmas is coming early to this household :-)

Of course, I can't actually watch it yet. I bought it, but it hasn't been delivered yet. I also bought a cabinet to put the TV on, since there wasn't much point having the TV delivered and just having it sit on the floor. I'm waiting for the cabinet, which was a special order, to arrive first, then I'll schedule the TV delivery. So I'm resigned to not having the TV until after Thanksgiving. At least I can sit back now in front of my little 36-inch, and look forward to the day when I can sit back in front of the biggest TV I've ever owned.

What kind of TV did I get? Things have never been more confusing. Should you buy a CRT / LCD / Plasma / DLP? Rear or Front Projection? 720p, 1080i or 1080p? What size should it be? Should I forget about a TV and go with a real projector and screen? I agonized over such details for a long time. And then there is a whole other layer of details to ponder which are just as important, but more arcane. Does the TV have HDMI inputs? What version of HDMI does it have? Does it support 1080p at both 24 and 60 frames per second for optimal display of film and video sources. Can it deinterlace 1080i sources properly? What do the blacks look like, what's the contrast ratio? How does it handle fast movement (motion blur)? What's the relationship between screen size and viewing distance and the ability of the human eye to resolve a 1080 image vs a 720 image? 

I have asked and answered all of these questions, researched them on the web, and drawing my conclusions until one TV set emerged the victor. Pioneer's new line of Plasma TVs, the Kuro. Kuro is a Japanese word which basically means "black". Or as Pioneer describes it, "Being of the achromatic color of maximum darkness."

The Kuros are winning reviews left and right - even being dubbed "Best Plasma Ever" in one review.  I agree :-)

Below is a photo of the model I bought - the 60-inch Elite Kuro PRO-150FD. Here's a link to the Pioneer site for an overview and specs.

This is going to be the beginning of a series of posts on the subject of Hi-Fi and High Definition Home Theater. I'm in the process of getting some new equipment for a home theater room in my house, so I'm in the mood to talk about it!

Since it's the first post in the series, I'm going to tell you some wistful memories of my youth :-)

I've been something of a hi-fi purist for many years, even while I didn't have the equipment or money necessary to soothe my purist tendencies. Years ago, when I was living in Dublin rent-free, I put together a sweet sounding system on a budget. The British view on hi-fi was a little different from the American view. It seemed Americans had these things called "receivers" which had odd things like radio tuners built-in. We didn't see too many of those in the UK or Ireland - most people had "amplifiers", which essentially do nothing more than take an incoming signal and drive it to the speakers. In keeping with this, the audiophile approach was to limit the amount of electronics in the amplifier to the bare essentials - i.e. use only the minimum amount of electronics required to amplify the signal.

I bought a Marantz stereo amplifier with no remote control, no tone or EQ controls - because that was all just electronic interference between getting the signal off the CD and out through the speakers. I left the amp turned on because the sound quality was noticeably better after it had warmed up for an hour or so. I matched it with a pair of Bose speakers (yeah, I know, not exactly audiophile, but they worked well with my amp), a Philips CD player on an isolation platter at the top of my rack table, and some seriously thick and expensive speaker cable which no wife would ever tolerate. All of this went on the rack with spiked feet and the speakers on stands again with spiked feet, to reduce vibrations as much as possible. The speakers were exactly placed in an equilateral triangle to my listening position, and I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with toeing in and distance from the wall. On a rumor, I even started painting the edges of my CDs with a special green marker to "reduce reflections".

The stereo imaging was very good, and I was entirely happy with it. Eventually I spent $1000 on a DVD player to add to the collection, and watching movies on my 27" TV with sound going through the amp and speakers. Nobody had really heard of "surround sound" or subwoofers back in those days - hi-fi was for music, not movies - but the stereo imaging of my system was good enough that I can still remember my friend Alan remarking on a sound effect mixed entirely to the right channel, which made me quite proud of my little system that could.

Alas, situations changed, and I moved to a house where I was sharing with two others. There really wasn't any space for my system, but they grudgingly let me set it up, but there was no way to center the speakers on the listening position and I could never listen to my music anyway as there was almost always someone in there watching TV. Finally I ended up selling everything when I moved to the US.

I've been in the US for almost 10 years now, and the world of hi-fi has changed so much in that time. You almost never hear of hi-fi anymore - it's all "home theater" these days. One of the first things I did when I got to the US was go out and buy a 36" TV (a CRT, namely a Sony Wega XBR with a flat front glass that makes the TV weigh more than me). It's still working great after daily use for several years. But I've never had the pure enjoyment of a carefully selected and positioned system as I had about 15 years ago.

Well, it's about time for me to start catching up with a system that entirely satisfies me. More on that ambitious goal next time :-)

If you look over to the right, you'll see a "Translate Spaces" gadget. It's using machine translation technology coming from Microsoft Research. I've defaulted the translation from English to Japanese, but it will support a number of other languages as well, such as English to both Chinese scripts (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Arabic, and more. I don't know how well it can translate my blog entries as I write in a very informal style, but hopefully it could help someone somewhere if they are not so familiar with English.

What I like best about it is the presentation format of the translation. The default view is to see the original English blog next to the machine translated blog, so you can compare side by side. Other views are available too, such as seeing the blog as a translated page with the original text available as a tooltip which pops up over each sentence when you mouse over it, or the opposite where you see the English page but on mouseover you get the translation as a tooltip. There's another view stacking both views vertically instead of horizontally (but I find it not that useful unless you've oriented your screen vertically).

Anyway, I think it's a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately no Thai translation yet... :-)

If you want to add it to your own Space, the gadget can be found here.

The really important question is if it provides useful translations to people, and I can't speak other languages well enough to judge its quality. Let me know what you think, and I can pass on your feedback to the folks in MS Research.

My oldest friend Alan (by which I mean my longest friend, not that he is in his 80s) reminded me that although I just turned 39 years old, it of course also means that I am now in my 40th year of life. This is entirely logical, since I lived for an entire year as 'age 0' between the day I leaped forth into the light and my 1st birthday. I will end my 40th year on my 40th birthday, a year from now.

A similar but totally opposite argument sprung up around the Millennium, with people divided between celebrating the event at the 1999-2000 new year, or the 2000-2001 new year. Again the awareness of there being no year 0 in the calendar is the issue - we went from 1BC to 1AD with no transition year. There was no equivalent of my living my first year as age 0.

Again, it's entirely logical to state that the first millennium ended, and the second one began, at midnight, January 1st, 2001. Yet the majority of the people on the planet choose to celebrate the year before, when 1999 became 2000.

It seemed to be a difficult concept for people to understand, or maybe they really do understand it, but they choose to ignore the logic in favor of emotion. Having 1xxx turn into 2xxx seemed to be the significant thing to most people. I understand the appeal of this, but I struggle with the emotional appeal versus the unpopular logical truth.

As I get older, I think I am more prepared to accept the emotional argument. When I was younger I was pretty strict that logic and reason should always win over emotion. Allowing emotions to dictate my actions was both a weakness and a recipe for disaster. Spock would have approved. As I get older, I can empathize more with people who tend to be led by emotion, and I can even acknowledge that a balanced emotional response together with logic and reason can actually benefit me in many cases, leading me to a more nuanced and well-rounded opinion.

All part of getting older, I guess.

Having said that, there are way too many people in the world today who are led only be emotions, and that's a dangerous thing indeed.

For about the last 12 hours, Microsoft has been allowing people to register '@live.com' accounts. This includes not only .com, but many ccTLD codes as well (ccTLD stands for country code top level domain, i.e. live.jp, live.de, etc).

Here is the link to get your account(s): http://get.live.com/getlive/overview 

If you are not getting the ccTLD you want, or you want a .com, you can hack the link to insert the RFC 4646 code for your language and location, so for example if you want live.ie (Ireland), use http://get.live.com/en-ie/getlive/overview. If you want live.jp (Japan), use http://get.live.com/ja-jp/getlive/overview, and so on.

If you don't know the correct RFC 4646 code to get the ccTLD you want, ask me in the comments.

Note: if you want a ccTLD account, bear in mind that you will be directed to a sign up page in the local language, not in English. So for example if you want to have a live.jp account, you'll need to be familiar enough with the Japanese language to sign up successfully, and you'll be provisioned with a Japanese language inbox at Hotmail too. If you are savvy enough, you can make it through just by memorizing the order of the fields in the English language version and typing accordingly, and finding the link to turn your Japanese inbox into English through Hotmail options page.

LiveSide has the list of all available ccTLD domains supported by this new @live.XX feature.

I was at the bank and at lunch when the email first came out, and by the time I got back to my desk, paul@live.com was gone :-(  I was bummed, but I quickly set about securing some other IDs which are important to me. I got the following:

paulb@live.com
pbennett@live.com
paulbennett@live.com
paul.bennett@live.com
paul-bennett@live.com
paul_bennett@live.com
bennettpaul@live.com
bennett.paul@live.com
bennett-paul@live.com
bennett_paul@live.com

I also got paul@live.jp as a consolation prize, having missed the .com and .ie options.

I am going to have to link all of these together to make things a bit easier to manage! Anyway, happy registering :-)

Before I do anything else today, I have to share this amazing home theater room with you which won 'best theme theater' at CEDIA. I might fantasize about having something like this in my nerdier moments, but I know I'd never actually go through with it. The guy who paid to have this built has the geek balls of steel to actually do it. But seriously, why not add some cup holders?

Does he actually say "make it so" before pressing play on the remote?

• building a dvd slideshow with iphoto - ranked #1
• suica & nex package narita - ranked #1 and #2
• where is my windows live msn puid - ranked #1 and #2

There's no guarantee that I will always rank like this for these queries as something more relevant may come along, but for now I delight in "beating" Apple, Microsoft and Japan Railways in providing what Google considers to be more relevant results than they can provide for their own products :-)

For the exact same queries, here is my rank on Live Search:

• building a dvd slideshow with iphoto - rank ??? (*I gave up looking when I couldn't find my site after FIFTEEN PAGES of search results.)
• suica & nex package narita - rank ??? (only 4 pages of results were available, and my site doesn't appear in ANY of them.)
• where is my windows live msn puid - rank ??? (*I again gave up looking after FIFTEEN PAGES of search results.)

Well, there you have it. Shocking indeed... I am happy to accept Google's honor, but simultaneously totally disgusted at Live Search's lack of ability to include my Space in its results. At first I wasn't sure what's going on - either the ranking algorithm (still) sucks compared to Google's, the ranking algo has different priorities or weighting than Google's, or, perhaps, Live Search is not even indexing my Space at all? A quick test gave me the answer: a query using advanced syntax to restrict the search only to my Space:

where is my windows live msn puid site:pbsea.spaces.live.com

This query did find my site and returned 4 hits for this query. So, they are indeed indexing my site. I don't have a clue how the ranking algo works for either Google or Live Search, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm drawing the following conclusions right now:

• Google spanks Live Search's ass, at least for the kind of relevance I care about.
• Maybe I am naïve, but Live Search seems to be doing a lousy job of having its own sister site, Live Spaces, rank anywhere on relevancy - (a) I didn't see any Spaces sites ranked highly for almost everything I tried, (b) my own Space is indexed but ranked next to nowhere, and (c) I've never ever seen anyone come to my Space from a Live Search query.
• I'd expect that at least Spaces users would tend to be searching within the Spaces website, but as I said in (c) above, nobody's ever come to my Space from Live Search, so it seems that Spaces users are not using Live Search, which is a missed opportunity for Live Search if ever I saw one.

I'm taking my Google results as evidence that there is a point to me writing this blog. If I was relying on Live Search, this blog would be one deserted ghost town.

I wonder if anyone on the Live Search team will ever read this? I guess not - not unless they are using the enemy's search engine ;-)