Another Productive Weekend

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Saturday was a bust with the weather and all, but Sunday was pretty productive. I still have my work cut out for me in the spring, with plenty of brickwork to do and some more trees and stumps to take out. But there are still some small things that can be done while we're still getting sunny days. I ran to Home Depot in the morning and picked up a bunch of 2x4s and some rafter hangers. I could have used a bud to help, but I did get to run some new rafters in the garage, and I put two 4x8 sheets of plywood up with a gap between them so I can put stuff up. All the space is already spoken for - I put my spare quad tires up, as well as the fake Christmas tree, some spare luggage and other crap taking up space on my garage floor.

I also nuked the bushes in the front of my house under the window. For some reason, flies were attracted to these strange holly bushes we had growing out front. I tied chains to them and yanked them out with my pickup truck.

With the rest of my spare time, I put a new spark plug in my quad and let it run for a while to charge the battery. I was going to change the oil, but I discovered that the gallon container of what I thought was engine oil was actually premix. I suspect that Craig might have my engine oil and I might have his premix for some reason. Maybe they got mixed up on the last quad trip.

If the weather remains warm, I might transplant an arborvitae from the front bed and put it next to the new fence in my side yard.

Office Reconditioned

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Well, we had painters come in to help fix the damage to our walls, and they left the office this morning. My office is basically fine, although I've got some bubbling paint on my windowsill and some of the photos on my walls fell down. A couple laptops did croak in the end, and we had a computer monitor and some other miscellaneous equipment fry, too. Eric tried his best with the power brick from his monitor - in the aftermath of the steam incident, it was so soaked that water actually poured out of the vents. We tried drying it out in the back of the office, but it's quite dead.

Our insurance inspector took an inventory at the end of last week. Eric and I are talking about which new laptops we ought to order.

Consoles Aren't Dead

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Lauren bought me an XBox 360 for Christmas last year. I got it hooked up to my network and to my home theater in the living room, but to tell you the truth, the console didn't get much use. Don't get me wrong, I did buy a handful of games for it - Madden, Lost Planet, Burnout Legends - about 18 games in total. I'd play a game of Madden here and there, but most of the time I didn't even get to finish my game. I never got around to finishing Lost Planet and I'm probably only a third of the way through the game. In a nutshell, I haven't used my XBox as much as I used to use other game consoles I've had, like PS2, DreamCast or even Super Nintendo. This weekend, I had some spare time so I spent a little more time exploring the features of my XBox. I had never explored the XBox Live area, so I loaded up on points and checked out some of the downloadable offerings there. What was really cool was the breadth of classic arcade games Microsoft sells. I bought three different Pac-Man games, a Tetris game, Rush N' Attack, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Yie-Ar Kung Fu and a few other games from my youth. These were great fun for a couple hours in the afternoon.

My home theater already has an iPod dock, but in exploring the XBox, I found out that I could stream music from network-connected PCs in my house. It requires the installation of some rather clunky Zune software, but I installed it on my home office PC and started streaming video and music to my XBox. There are some really cool visualizations for the television, so it was pretty cool letting some music blast at high volume and seeing the trippy patterns as I did some straightening up.

I meant to check out some of the community features like chat and IM. However, unlike the young 'uns out there in high school or college who probably have tons of buds with gamer handles, I really don't know any of my friends' handles. If you've got a gamer handle, shoot me a quick e-mail or leave your handle in comments. I want to check this out.

One of the things that I was looking out for was the marketing. And yes, you did see some underwritten games in the Marketplace from the likes of Toyota and the U.S. Army. It seems like the platform has plenty of other opportunities for reaching out from a marketing perspective. (Well, as long as the approach isn't the typical ham-handed one.) Underwritten or otherwise-subsidized games are only one approach. What about things like IM skins and sponsored apps? How about multi-channel promotions that let people earn points to redeem toward games?

I've been talking about campaigns like this for years in my columns. Spending some time with the platform, though, has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for these types of programs.