Ah.

[tfabris]

It's been a good Christmas so far... and there's more to come.

It started with picking up Seanan at the airport on Christmas day, and having a great rehearsal with Betsy. The show on Saturday at Wayward was incredibly fun, and I was amazed to see how many folks came out to see us on the day after Christmas. Thanks everyone for coming!

We have a house full of loved ones now, with gfish now permanently back home, and tereshkova2001 is returning tomorrow to make it a complete set. It's warm and cozy and geeky.

Because everyone was scattered about and doing things on the traditional Christmas day, we're saving our official Agora household Christmas for tomorrow. Tonight? GORN CANNON!

Here's a fun Christmas story. Well, fun for me anyway:

We're all sitting around the TV, watching "Die Hard" because Seanan hadn't ever seen it. Plus, it's a Christmas movie. A completely different kind of Christmas movie than Grinch or Wonderful Life, but a Christmas movie nonetheless. Plus, Alan Rickman. You can't go wrong with Alan Rickman. (Side note: We all want a sweatshirt now.)

So we're watching it from a DVD, which is playing on the Playstation 3. The PS3 is great for watching DVDs in terms of sound and picture quality, but the pain of having to use the PS3 game controller to pause or rewind a DVD is nearly unbearable. When you pick up the controller, it's either already powered itself off to save battery charge, or you accidentally bump one of its soft finger triggers and inadvertently skip forward a chapter.

We've got a fantastic universal remote, but the Playstation doesn't have an infrared transceiver, so you can't use the remote with it. Each time someone curses at the PS3 controller, I have to explain that I need to get the proper "doohickey" (technical term) that lets me control the PS3 videos with the remote.

So Vixy takes a present out from under the tree and makes me open it, despite my protests that it's two days early, since we're not doing presents until Tuesday. And what do you know, it was an honest to goodness doohickey!

After industrial-lasering the blister packaging open, I was worried about having to interrupt the playback of Die Hard to make the doohickey work. I figured it would need some kind of setup or configuration. But the amazing thing is, I plugged it in during the movie and it just worked. Plug in the doohickey, and suddenly I can pause and unpause the movie in progress without touching the game controller. That's what amazed me: A tech gadget that actually Just Worked Exactly Like You'd Expect It To. No rebooting the console, no having configure it via setup menus, nothing. Just plug it in, and poof it works. Now that's a good OOBE. (We're going to disregard for a moment that a better OOBE would have been for the PS3 to have had an IR transcever built-in in the first place.)

Vixy is made of awesome. But you all already know that.

Anyone else have good OOBE's this Christmas?

Comments

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

Good OOBE's? James' trainset. Or at least, the rather hi-tech DCC wireless controller that came with it. Unbox, insert batteries, attach to track, place loco on track. Loco moves in expected direction. Hit program button, follow directions, assign loco new ID and name. Swap for other loco. Repeat.

Man, model railways have got smarter since I was his age! :D

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

Mine came with a bluetooth remote. But we bought it in a bundle, so.
The lack of IR /is/ kind of annoying, in that I /have/ to use their remote and can't teach the new stereo remote how to control it, so I might end up getting an IR doohickey as well.

What I'm trying to say is that I'd like to know the address of the parallel universe from which yours was ordered, where they make things that Just Work.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Supposedly it's a place called "Theory".

(Everything works, in Theory.)

[bluesmancd.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear you're having a great Christmas. I wish that I could have been at the Wayward, but I was out in Port Townsend playing w/ the DuFresne band again. I'm hoping that we get (or make) the opportunity for something musical again really soon.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Fella got me a Tom-Tom (when I know how to use a Thomas Guide perfectly well, thank you) - which allowed me to pick John Cleese's voice, OOB. Oh very win, indeed. It's been very niiiiice.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, customizable voices for nav systems is a fantastic feature. I know some people who want to get their directions from this guy. Me personally? No contest, it'd have to be GlaDOS. It would be fun to distrust every single thing it said.

[thefrugalgamer.livejournal.com]

Just got back from a road trip to see my folks, with the Tom-Tom directing. We played around with the voice settings, and the Australian guy is really a smart-ass. I loved it! ("WELL, it would have been better if you had followed that direction. Why don't you try to make a U-turn while I re-calculate.")