Gaming

  • Independence Bowl

    Chris BenardGaming, Other Peeps, Personal, Television

    Independence Bowl Ticket My work allowed all employees to sign up for two free tickets for the Independence Bowl.  I’m not normally into football, unless it’s LSU playing, but I figured it was free, and I’ve never actually been to a football game in real life.  It was pretty fun.

    It was Alabama vs. Colorado.  Apparently, I’m supposed to cheer for Colorado, since Bama is LSU’s arch enemy or something.  Colorado kinda sucked, especially their weak offense, and they lost 30-24.  Colorado did take an actual buffalo and parade it all around the field, so that was pretty neat, and I think we were on TV for a few seconds, but I’m not sure.

    Cold Weather Clothes It is cold outside, and I don’t really have any cold weather clothes.  I was wearing my normal Old Navy jacket and my City Name Sports Team T-shirt (apropos).  When I arrived at Jenny‘s apartment to go shopping, eating, and to the game, Rachel informed me that I’d be freezing.  I thought we were just going to get a new jacket with a hood and some gloves for me, and Jenny and Rachel were going to get gloves.

    Me, Jenny, Rachel Independence Stadium View From Our Seats Jenny let me know that hoods aren’t cool and made me get a pea coat.  I’d never even heard of such a thing.  I also got a sweater from Marshall’s and a hat and gloves from Wal-Mart.  I like the sweater, and I’ve never had any of those either, but I don’t know how I feel about the pea coat yet, and that stupid thing was $50, even at the cheap store, Ross.

    Bama FansThe pea coat, hat that covered my ears, sweater, and gloves kept me nice and warm, and I drank a little which helped too.  Now I have cold weather clothes and I’ve been to a football game!  We got there right as the 1st quarter was ending, and left 3 minutes into the 4th quarter to beat traffic.  We caught the end of the game on ESPN HD and watched Colorado lose.

    Then I played some kind of gun game on Jenny’s Wii.  I think it’s called Crossbow Training or something.  There was no Mii for me on the Wii, so I created one of those first.  That was the hardest part!  I got silver on my first try on the game, but it’s not as fun as shooting real guns. 

  • Sharing Media to the Xbox 360 Using Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2

    Chris BenardGaming, Personal

    I heard about this from DigitalLifeTV. Microsoft now has on their Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 site the following information:

    Share it New for Beta 2

    The new Media Sharing feature of Windows Media Player 11 lets you enjoy the contents of your Windows Media Player library from anywhere in your home. If you have a home network (wired or wireless), you can use Windows Media Player 11 to stream the contents of your library to networked devices. For example, if you have an Xbox 360 or other digital media receiver (DMR), you can use Windows Media Player to stream music and pictures from your computer to that device. This even works with music that you’ve downloaded from PlaysForSure music stores and services. For more information, see Digital Media at Home.

    This made me really happy since I’ve used Windows Media Connect before. WMC eats memory and CPU likes nobody’s business, so I don’t run it. As a result, I can’t listen to any of my music on my Xbox 360 across the network, even though I’d like to. Microsoft claims to have fixed this with Windows Media Player 11, and lots of people have quoted that little bit of information, but nobody has actually posted information on how to accomplish it. I love and use Windows Media Player 11 and I recently upgraded to Beta 2 with my last Windows reinstall. I read the help and set it up and hopefully this helps someone.

    Step 1First, right click on the title bar (or hit Alt) and go to Tools and then click Options.

    Step 2Then, click the “Configure Sharing” button.

    Steps 3 and 4Click on the “Share my media to:” checkbox. Click on “Settings”.

    Steps 5 and 6Configure the appropriate settings according to what you desire. If you want to allow anyone to view your media that is on your local network, select “Allow new devices and computer automatically (not recommended)”. You may have to do this initially if the Xbox can’t see files on the Windows computer.

    Step 7That’s it! You should be able to go to the Media blade in your Xbox 360 dashboard and select computer. Your windows computer should show up and add itself in the Windows Media Player 11 sharing pane.

    You can view your songs by artist, genre, album, song, and you can also play your playlists that are created in Windows Media Player 11. To reiterate, you can create multiple playlists in WMP, even smart playlists, the ones that automatically pick songs based on criteria, and those will be available for playback on your Xbox automatically. This is all in addition to letting other Windows Media Player 11 instances on the network being able to access the media as well. Sure, iTunes did the media sharing via Rendevouz first, but as usual Microsoft embraced and extended. This is really awesome.

    Please give me feedback if this helps or if it can be improved. I also put together a Flickr photoset with all those pictures in it. Each of the above pictures is a link to the Flickr image and you can zoom to full size on any of them. Yes my living room is messy. Shut up.