Weekend Catchup

This week was pretty taxing on me what with the Las Vegas trip and all, and I got a lot done recently but haven’t been writing about it. Here’s a quick smattering.

Home Networking
I’m giving up on wirelessly bridging my media system to my AV setup. I use Airport Express’s Airtunes feature to play my music through my sounds system and I use my PS3 to play my videos from my Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS media library. I used to have only occasional wireless interference, now it seems constant, and I can’t stand it when my videos skip or worse when my music just stops. If all my time in college radio taught me anything it’s that I hate dead air.
Broke down and got a pair of Netgear Powerline adapters (specifically the XE102 single adapter and XE104 4-port), and I’ll see how it goes.

Olympics
Women’s beach volleyball is wonderful to watch.
Holy fricking Michael Phelps.  0.01 seconds?  Are you kidding me?
Man, I wish there were more time for me to watch the Olympics.

Tropic Thunder
I’m not a Ben Stiller fan.  Sometimes I’m not a Jack Black fan.  Robert Downey, Jr. on the other hand slays me. I probably watched this movie just for Downey’s performance, and if that’s all I came for, I would have been happy.  I think it’s a happy coincidence that most everyone else’s performance was excellent.  It was definitely a good confluence of characters.  Ridiculously offensive, it obliterates the line of taste in a couple spots, but delivers very solid laughs.  Be sure to get there early and watch the trailers, as it will be special.

Soul Calibur IV
That’s “4” for you mortals. I have a PS3 so I have the Darth Vader version. It’s kinda fun, but it’s hard to play tactically since it’s so fast. It usually devolves into button-mashery and then it feels less fun. Playing against others, though, is still fun if only for the sheer randomness of the wins. I feel like I’m rolling dice rather than actually battling it out. I’m sure someone plays this game well, but I hope to never meet them.