Jennifer's 365 Project

Or is it snowpocalypse, snowOMG, snowtoriousBIG, or some other name being bandied about on Twitter? There's a coming storm, forecasted blizzard conditions, and all that jazz. In 2009 there was a lot of buzz about a snow storm that fizzled into virtually nothing more than heavy snowfall on a regular winter day. There was also a bit in December about snowpocalypse as well, but nothing happened.

So we'll see. We grabbed some gas since we were running low, and I brought my work laptop home just in case. This could be an epic, snowed in extravaganza, or just a crappy commute to work tomorrow.

So part of the evening I worked on getting the Kinect and Lord of the Rings Online to work together. I didn't take and photos but I did take a screenshot for keybinding reference.

It was mostly a much less successful attempt than World of Warcraft. I managed to kill a boar, but then launched the LOTRO store about a gazillion times. Still not sure how I did that since I didn't have a key bound for the LOTRO store....

More work this week. Hope to have a post up on Casual Stroll to Mordor in the next week or so after I get some kinks worked out.

This afternoon I decided to hook up the Kinect to my laptop and try getting an MMO working with it. Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO was having some server issues so I snagged the keybindings from FAAST's forums and booted up World of Warcraft (WoW).
The bindings are very basic - just an introduction. I plan on elaborating on them over the next week or so and trying both WoW again as well as LOTRO. I also need to figure out how to capture video with both the video game and the FAAST software (so far I've only managed to capture one or the other).

It does add a whole new level of game-play and I'm excited to play with the Kinect some more.
With the newly open living room space, I decided to try the Wii Fit again. It was sure to let me know I've been absent for a year and a half. Oops.

Chris has been on the hunt for a replacement rug for as long as I can remember. Today a replacement rug was finally procured! Chris also re-arranged the living room to be more Kinect friendly (which meant temporarily removing the coffee table).
Leki is a big fan of the change. He loves new stuff - whether it is open floorspace or new toys - both of which he received today. Chris had several cat toys that Leki took an immediate liking to.
As for me, I spent several hours bouncing between twitter, the Guardian's live blog, and live streaming coverage of Egypt by Al Jazeera. There are several journalists on the ground live-tweeting the goings on in Cairo and elsewhere. As you can see from the picture above, I opted to switch from cable TV news coverage to more in-depth live streaming on my iPod touch with Al Jazeera's iOS app. It's big news - heck, even Attack of the Show did a short segment on Friday, which is a day they don't air new content.

If you haven't heard anything on the goings on in Egypt, I suggest you check out those sources for more information.

Also, this article is a good read on why the US doesn't get Al Jazeera - in case you were wondering what the network was or why you might not have ever heard of it before.

Ok, enough news and politics. Tomorrow it's back to your regularly scheduled boring daily photo posts!

Deliciousness at The Pita House for lunch with Lori!

The afternoon was a snowy one. Walking just a few minutes over to the skywalk was chilly and by the time I was done with lunch about an hour later it seemed like there was a good 1/2 inch of accumulation. 

In the evening Chris & I checked out Champions Online. It's recently gone free to play (F2P) so why not?
It has a character creation that is on steroids. You get a lot more granular control than other MMOs such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI/XIV, Lord of the Rings Online, etc. You can manipulate facial structure as well as your superhero outfits as well as accessories. The character creation reminds me sort of like some Bethesda games I've played such as Morrowind or Oblivion (sans superhero spandex, that is).

We're still in the intro area so it will be interesting to see what it opens up to.

You know your significant other is awesome when you start rambling about a book you had as a child that was awesome and he walks over to his bookshelf and hands his copy to you. So, in the words of Comfort and Adam, he's totally my lobster.

It was a busy Tuesday evening. I bounced around in front of the TV playing Kinect. I like playing a few of the sports in Kinect Sports (and I'm not even a sports fan) and, since it's all over Raptr, I can't hide that I've started playing a dance game. I never really got into DDR, but I imagine this is similar but without the board to step on. I'll still only play the if the cat is the only one in the room.

After I was done playing wit the xbox for a few hours (more in the last few days than in the whole time we've owned the thing) Chris and I started to prepare to watch the State of the Union and play SOTU bingo!

It was a good few hours with speeches, twitter, bingo, and plenty of snark. As you can see, I won! Even after missing a few items due to distractions from living room discussions and twitter following.

I spent a big chunk of the weekend bouncing around in front of the TV playing Kinect games, but the big reason I wanted one was for what you can do with it on the computer. There's a whole host of things out there since the Kinect went on sale, from shadow puppets to street mapping. What caught my interest was the application to desktop games. Specifically - MMOs.
So Chris and I spent about an hour fiddling with the Kinect. If you haven't taken a look at and read the page for the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton (FAAST) you should. It's awesome and easy to set up. You can see a lot of potential for this.
So first thing after getting everything installed (FAAST, drivers, etc) was to try out hands at minesweeper. It's a little different moving forward and backward to navigate on the board, but it works. Originally we had it so if you jumped you'd click the square, but since we're on the 3rd floor of an apartment this quickly got changed to hand waving.

Here's just a quick snippit of what we did to the bindings.txt file:

lean_left 15 key left_arrow
lean_right 15 key right_arrow
lean_forwards 20 key up_arrow
lean_backwards 20 key down_arrow
wave 0 key enter

Just add that to the action tab and hit start input emulation!

Next up is creating a more robust list of actions for LOTRO.

It's been a different kind of day. First off, I slept in. I never sleep in. Even if I stayed up all night I still wake up no later than 7:30 thanks to a cat on a very strict schedule. Not today. Hello nearly 10am.

Plus I'm sore, like I did real exercise. I guess I kind of did yesterday with the Kinect and now my body has a Kinect hangover. Between the two of us we played about three hours of Kinect games yesterday and I've played about an hour again today. Really what this all tells me is that I'm not active enough, which I knew already. I don't like aerobics, dancing, yoga, etc. Toss a video game in the mix though and yeah, you can sell it to me better. Now the real trick is to see how long I stay interested. The only thing I've managed to maintain consistently is walking several miles every day. And that's mostly helped by the fact that I work downtown and walk everywhere.
It hasn't snowed much more today, but it's been very chilly out. Squirrels have stopped by a few times looking to see if we've put out any food. Mostly they've been disappointed, but the cat has been entertained by their comings and goings.

It's been a quiet day, which is nice for a Sunday. Chris even got to do another epic amount of link blogging today.

To me, the Kinect originally sounded interesting, it wasn't until I started hearing about FAAST and possibilities with that (plus Microsoft is going to put out their own official development kit shortly for the computer). Toss in 20% off one-day only coupon and I'm in!
So we headed out a little past midnight, figuring since the Kinect is normally hard to find with the coupon it might be even harder. We drove to two different stores but finally at a little past 1am we had a Kinect in hand and were headed back home. Given how crappy the roads ended up being today, I'm glad we opted to shop at midnight as opposed to noon.
Now, the long term plan is to use the Kinect more with the computer than the Xbox 360, but that doesn't mean we can't play with some Kinect games, right? So Chris and I played a few games together, and I messed around playing soccer and some other sports games by myself as well.

It's very similar to the Wii on a lot of things, but you can't fake movement as easily. With the Wii you can just flip your wrist back and forth - you don't actually have to move your whole body. Not so with the Kinect since it's watching your whole frame. I'm more impressed than I thought I would be. I agree with what Chris has to say about it.
The huge drawback with the Kinect is the amount of room it needs. We don't have a large living room - it's just barely big enough for the kinect after we move the coffee table. Barely. That's ok - we knew that before we bought it. Still, it's a little tricky for both of us to play at the same time. More so than with the Wii.

Leki, of course, loves the extra room on the floor. He couldn't stop rolling around in front of us while we played, snagging stray pant legs that got too close to his domain.

Tasty lunch with Lori today at The Dog Pit!