My Life and Code

It's been a few months since I've written anything here. Things have been extremely hectic, and any downtime has usually been spent trying to relax and recharge. In fact, I haven't had time to think about what to write here, so this blog entry will be a hodge-podge of miscellaneous thoughts and updates. I've been playing the new Mortal Kombat game. When I heard it would be moving back to a 2D fighting plane, and doing a "Let's go back in time and have an alternate history of the first three games (a la the latest Star Trek film)", I had absolutely no interest. But the pulled it off very well. Yes, I do miss the strategy and depth allowed by a 3D plane, and miss the multiple fighting styles that the characters have had in the last 3 games, but what's there is really good, and I love the addition of a 2-Player tag team co-op mode -- my son and I enjoy playing this together. I like the focus on characters from the first 3 games, though the downloadable ...

I posted a few weeks ago about a problem I had with the Microsoft SYNC system in my car not hearing my voice commands . At the time, a simple restart of my car seemed to fix the problem, but since then, the problem got worse and worse until finally not even the Bluetooth pairing to my phone would work. This was extremely frustrating considering I'd owned the car just over a month at the time. I Googled the problem and found that (surprise) other people were having the same problem, and recently. Some thought it was related to the cold. My first thought was to make sure I had the latest version of the software installed, but when I went to the official SYNC website and attempted to download the software, nothing happened. I turned on FireBug after several unsuccessful attempts to monitoring what was going on when I'd press the button and nothing would happen, and found out that there was a JavaScript error occurring that was then being submitted to a service to be logged...but n...

I recently purchased a new car, the first I've had in 14 years. My previous car had reached the end, and I had no choice but to buy a new one. While I didn't get anything too fancy -- I didn't get a luxury car, or a sports car, or anything like that -- the new car does have Microsoft Sync, which allows you to do a bunch of neat stuff like sync up your cell phone via Bluetooth so you can dial and talk hands free, and do other things via voice commands. The voice command stuff usually works pretty good, but not always, and yesterday, I ran into a definite glitch: it wasn't recognizing any voice commands. At first, I was trying to use some of the stuff that I hadn't used before, but every time I issued a command, the Sync would sound the tone that means "I didn't understand that." Ironically, when it would offer suggestions on what I should say, I found it offering up the very same command I was trying to give it. I decided to give up on trying the new s...