The One with the Xbox Kinect

We ordered the Xbox Console with Kinect yesterday. After writing the last post, I did a quick check on Amazon and found that it was sold out and I was told that was the case in other stores. I also read that Microsoft was asking people to order one this week if they wanted to get one for Christmas, I was really down on reading it and I was all set to start blaming S for it (I like to blame him for all my problems in life, isn't that what all wives do?) Then someone told me that Best Buy had got some and I checked the site and viola! I quickly ordered one and we picked it up yesterday.

And the verdict - WOW! It really is amazing. It does a good job of recognizing arm and leg movements and as far as voice commands go, it doesn't seem to have a problem my accent. We didn't buy any game for the Kinect and we just played with the Kinect Adventures game that it came with. The game is very light and is just intended to let people know what the Kinect can do. The games are in 3D and I did face a little problem with mapping co-ordinates, but it's not overly sensitive and I managed to get the hang of it soon. The surprising thing was, I worked up a sweat in the 45 mins I spent playing this game. I am yet to check out the other games on Kinect - I want to buy Dance Central and Joy Ride. I hope the games live upto their hype, because unless there are good games there is precious little that one can do with the console. It was bit of a gamble to buy this new piece of technology so soon (I usually never buy any first generation product) But since the Xbox 360 is something that we can use without the Kinect, I am not very worried. And at the rate at which Kinect seems to be flying off the shelves, I think we will have more games on it soon.

In other news, I got a new pair of glasses and I spent the day thinking that I looked like Tina Fey. Then last evening we were watching The Big Bang Theory and S said "Look, Leonard's glasses look so similar to your new ones" and my bubble burst. However a couple of people at work said my new glasses look really good though. I have a 90 day period to decide if I like the glasses, so we'll see. What I really want is to get Lasik done so that I can be done with glasses, contacts and prescription sunglasses forever! Wonder how much it costs.

A Serious Case of the Gimmes

Like I discussed at length in my previous post, sometimes when I want something, I want it really bad. A few years ago, it was the iPod (you can read about it here and here) Now, everyone knows that I am a music ignoramus. And I hardly never listen to music. Even when I am at the gym, I watch TV while working out. If there's ever a person who should not get a 30GB ipod, it's me. And I knew all that and yet I wanted it. I imagined myself listening to music all the time and filling my ipod with new age music. Cut to 2010, I have less than 3GB of music in my ipod. The newest album on it is Vettaiyadu Vilayadu. I use for 30 mins each night to listen to Crazy Mohan/S.VE Shekar dramas.

My newest craze is the Kinect. For the uninitiated, Kinect is a sort of add on for the XBox 360 which lets you play games without a controller. In their own words, you are the controller. So they have a camera to track your actions, so that in a dancing game, it tracks your dance moves and you can see it on the screen. I really think Microsoft is marketing it really well. When I see the Kinect ad where people are having fun dancing, driving imaginary cars with imaginary wheels, I want one too. Again like the ipod, I don't doubt that the Kinect is an awesome game platform. It's just that S and I are one of the laziest people to roam the earth. We like our couch and enjoy the time we spend sitting on it. The only games we play on the Wii are the ones that we can sit and play. When we feel the need to exercise, we haul our rear ends to the gym and we both believe that exercise games on the Wii or Kinect are not very effective. So buying the Kinect is not really a good move for us at all. I am sure we will be all excited and play with it for a week and then let it gather dust till someone visits us and wants to try it (that's what happened with the Wii Motion Plus!) However since both of us are moderately interested in regular video games, I am sure that we would enjoy playing games like Halo on the XBox. The XBox 360 costs $199 and with the Kinect bundle it costs $299. Despite everything I've written here I am sure that we will end up buying the Kinect bundle (if we decide to buy the Xbox 360 that is).

While I am very free with my money when it comes to day to day things, ("Let's buy the more expensive laundry detergent", "Let's go out to eat, I don't care that we went out for dinner yesterday", "Tip the waitress 30%, she was really good to us") I am usually wise (or so I think) when it comes to big purchases. I still use the same laptop that I used in grad school and I have no plans to replace it anytime soon - even after watching the numerous MacBook Air ads on TV. Our TVs at home are really old and despite my initial love of the iPad, I don't plan to buy one ever. I know that I am not the most careful with money (like my father likes to point out every time I tell him we went out for dinner for 2 days in a row) but since I don't spend on these big things, I used to think that it cancels out. But the Kinect seems to prove otherwise. Since S is worse than me, I am sure that we are never going to leave our children houses, wealth and money. However we both have a zest for life and a desire to live our life to the fullest, travel widely, do crazy things just because we want to and this kind of people are never expected to have money in the bank, are they? :-)

PS People don't give me grief about people who save money and yet manage to live a full life. A girl is allowed to have her delusions right?

Junoon

When you talk to people who know me really well, they will tell you that I can be a very stubborn person. When I was young I was really known for my "pidivadam" - I am not able to find a good English translation for that. I have been told that when I was 1 or 2, I would start crying in the middle of the night for no reason and would not stop crying till my aunt (who was 12 or 13 years old at that time) would dance for me. I have never displayed any propensity towards any form of dancing, and I think I just wanted to get what I wanted.

Growing up, I remember throwing tantrums for a lot of silly things. Once when I was about 10, Kwality Walls ice creams had just been introduced in India. I bought an ice cream on a stick which had 3 flavors, so that it looked a rainbow. I was really excited about the ice-cream and all through school I thought about eating that at home. When I came home, I noticed that my mother had forgotten to keep the ice-cream in the freezer and had kept in the regular portion of the fridge. So all the 3 flavors had melted and fused into one. Instead of realizing that this is spilled milk and asking for a new ice-cream, I threw a big tantrum about it and refused to talk to anyone or eat. I think my biggest grouse was that my mother had not admitted that she had kept it there by mistake and insisted that she didn't know the ice-cream would melt if kept in the refrigerator outside of the freezer. (Many people tell me I inherited the stubborn gene from my father, but I really think it's from my mother! :-)) I doubt if my parents or sister remember this (btw, her ice-cream was safe in the freezer for some reason, which made me angrier at that time), but I wonder why I didn't attempt to resolve the issue and asking my mother for a new icecream rather than be upset about the other one.

I think the reason is, I tend to plan a lot of things in my head and when things don't go exactly according to the plan I freak out since I don't have a Plan B all mapped out. And many times, my plans would go awry when my father was involved. My father does not remember things and almost never reaches any place in time. I remember telling him the PTA meeting at school is at 3pm when it would actually be at 4pm so that he would get there in time. And my father hates saying no to anything that my sister and I ask for. So he would promise us whatever we asked for. And he would always mean to follow through with the promise, but sometimes he would forget. Like once he promised to buy us bicycles. For a 10 year old, that's a huge deal. Me being me, expected to get the bicycle the day after he promised it. I did not get it. After waiting a couple of days, I took matters into my own hands and started my usual tantrum "I want to get the bicycle today!" and refused to talk to anyone and locked myself in my room. I remember my father coming up to try and talk to me, but I refused to relent. I did not get the cycle that day (coz those days, buying a cycle meant going to Parrys and it simply was not possible to do that in the evening). But that weekend we did go and get the Street Hawk cycle I wanted.

Though my father forgot a lot of things, he was far more understanding of my "Must do it NOW" attitude than my mother. She would just say "No" and go about her merry way. My father would really try to do or get what I wanted, but most of the things I wanted would involve going back in time to satisfy me. My sister threw tantrums too, but those would be doable, like she would ask for a huge bar of chocolate when we are out and though that was less from ideal, it was something that my parents could actually do. I know Karma will make sure when I have a kid, she/he would be just like me and ask for impossible things. I hope that I am able to have the same patience that my father had, towards my kids. (People who know my father personally would find it funny that I attribute a virtue like patience to him, but he has always been a different man when it came to his girls!)

I have read that girls subconsciously try to marry a man who is just like their father and I think I have completely succeeded in doing that. S could actually be my father's son. He has the same short fuse, the same generosity, the same attitude towards everything in life as my father. Sometimes when I talk to my mother about S, she is amazed at how much alike he is to my father. Like my father, he lacks in the "getting things done right-away" department. In the initial years of my relationship, we used to have a lot of arguments and fights about his lackadaisical attitude. I think my mother might have had the same arguments 25 years back with my father. We have now reached a implicit agreement, I try to add a buffer zone to my plans and he tries to actually do something rather than just wanting to do it at some point in time.

I guess there is no point to this post. It doesn't really go with the tone of my blog and seems more personal than my past posts and I might decide to pull this down later. But then like my sister says, it's just a few people who read my blog so I might just keep it. :-)

PS. The way I've written this post, my sister comes off as an angel. But believe me when I say I am the good one. :-) Her shenanigans will fill ten such posts. While I had just my father indulging me, she had my grandmother, aunt and uncle (who lived with us) twisted around her little finger.

Outsourced

For the past 3 weeks, my DVR has been dutifully recording episodes of "Outsourced" and I have been skipping watching these episodes even when I have absolutely nothing to watch. My first grouse against this show was that it was replacing my favorite "Parks and Recreation". The second and most important reason is that I am extremely sensitive to criticism (perceived or real) by people who know nothing about it. A year ago, a friend had suggested I read "Two States" by Chetan Bhagat and had insisted that I would enjoy. But about halfway through the book, I was seething with rage. I felt like Bhagat was making a lot of assumptions about Tam Brams and I found it impossible to finish the book. I didn't watch "Outsourced" since I figured it would make me angry and unpleasant and so I let those 3 episodes sit in my DVR and taunt me.

Last weekend, S & I spent the entire weekend rooted to the couch watching endless hours of TV. And then it happened, S refused to watch an old episode of Frasier that we've watched a a million times before and he wanted to watch some new episodes of Outsourced. I braced myself and started watching. And nothing. No anger, no wanting to throw a vase at the TV and I didn't even want to hunt down the phone number of the producers and yell at them on the phone! And I was even able to laugh at the jokes. Which is not to say that they have been kind or factual in portraying India. Which call center in India is located in a building in the midst of a market (with cows roaming around)? Hell the call center buildings in India are much nicer than the building that I currently work out of. And on the subject of cows roaming around, couldn't they have gotten a nice Indian cow rather than showing some fuzzy American cows? And when they want to show that we drink tender coconut water, we do not drill a hole into the coconut and sip out of a straw, we actually slice the top off. My biggest grouse have to be the way the actors talk though. They make the Indian actors say such American phrases in an Indian accent. As though the fake accent somehow makes it sound authentic. Why not just make the Indians use Indian phrases and slang instead? Or actually have an Indian writer, someone who has lived in India for at least a few years? I feel that someone like me could really help straighten things up in Outsourced, since the show has a lot of potential. So are you listening NBC? :-)

In other sitcom news, Running Wilde is in the danger of getting canceled! I am really really disappointed. I really liked the show and Will Arnett is terrific! I really thought that this could be a good replacement for Arrested Development (which is really the best show on TV ever!) Come everyone, we need good shows to stay on TV and which means y'all have to actually watch them.

Mishmash

As I begin to wet my feet in the waters of blogging once again, I find it easier to write posts that are just a bunch of unrelated thoughts. I don't know if it's a side effect of Twitter, but for now this will have to do. But fear not loyal readers, I will start writing posts dedicated to specific topics.

* For all the grief I give H about living in UK, I think a little part of me is obsessed with Britain. Most of my favorite authors have been British right from my childhood. And the I think there is a lovely ring to the English accent. I would love to tour through Europe, making sure to spend some time in the English countryside. All in good time. :-)

* In a lovely gesture, S got me a Coach handbag for my birthday. While the bag is very nice, I have come to realize a lot many things. My ratty wallet looks even rattier when ensconced inside the Coach bag. I need a new wallet pronto. Also I am now terrified of having a pen in my bag for the fear that I might get some ink in the lovely velvet interiors. Also, I don't have a zillion bags that switch in and out of circulation, I usually buy one bag, run it to the ground and when it starts looking nasty I get the next one and so on. I am terrified that this might happen to a bag that costs as much a laptop. I am now in a constant state of worry, I actually wiped the desk with a wipe before placing my bag on it. I think I am only cut out to carry unknown brand bags with a zillion pockets!

* In other news, S has finally taken the plunge and ordered a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. Which means that he will take longer than ever to take pictures. I kid you not, I stood in front of the Statue of Liberty for 10 whole minutes with the same plastic smile on my face while S fiddled with the various modes in his humongous point and shoot. So I foresee hours of posing for pictures in my future. Why can't the man be happy those small cute cameras that can fit into my pocket and have no buttons except the click button?

* We watched The Town yesterday. It was a good one. **SPOILER ALERT** But it was so obvious in the beginning of the movie that Coughlin was going to die. I kept bracing myself for that and tada as predicted at the end of the movie, he dies. **END SPOILERS** At the beginning of the movie, we saw a trailer for "Jack Goes Boating" and I immediately told S that we are going to watch this movie. I loved Little Miss Sunshine and Sunshine Cleaning and I am not about to miss the next movie from the same makers.

* Endhiran is being screened in Madison this weekend. When Padayappa was released, I remember my friends inviting me to watch that movie. But I simply had zero interest and refused to go. But I admit to watching Sivaji and will definitely watch Endhiran this weekend. I think Shankar is doing a good job of marketing the movies and creating a buzz or I guess my threshold for masala movies has decreased over the years. :-)

That's all for today folks.

On My Mind

A friend and fellow blogger recently emailed me and asked me update my blog. In true Indian style, I bargained with him that I would update mine if he updated his. I didn't expect that he would actually go ahead and write and now I am 2 days late on my end of the deal. :-(

So what's a better quickie blog than spewing what's on my mind onto electronic pen and paper? Without much ado, I present to you - thoughts that are running muck in my ADD brain right now.

I have this sudden hankering for the books I read as a child. I can almost smell the musty bookshelves of Eashwari Lending Library. Would love a pile of Enid Blytons.

The older I get, the more difficulty I have in justifying large purchases for myself. Whenever I spend money I literally hear huge alarm bells that remind me of my student loans and pitifully small Savings account. And after I bite the bullet and actually make the purchase, I tend to dissect it in my mind a thousand times and I make S return it. People who know me in real life will be greatly surprised, since I am somewhat known as the family spend-thrift! Though this new habit of mine is helping to reduce the clutter at home, it's still not helping in saving any money. This is because these alarm bells I talk about, seem to take a break when it comes to intangible things like planning a trip or going out to eat.

Having said so much about not speding money, I really have my heart set on buying another game console. I was sold solid on the PS3 and we even ordered one. But the day after we got our new PS3, they announced the new one with more memory for the same price. I immediatly returned the one we have. Now Sony has come up with a motion controller called Move and Microsoft has announced the Kinect for controller free gaming. Now I am all confused about which one to buy. Practically it makes more sense to go with Sony, as the PS3 would also be a Blue Ray player. But Microsoft has really captured my interest with the Kinect. Time to wait and watch before buying.

This weekend S & I caught this movie called Devil. It was pretty ok - had a good pace and a nice twist ending. We both really like supernatural movies, but I have one rule - no maggots or insects coming out of anyone's ears or mouth and no disgusting creatures. I remember this movie called Drag Me to Hell which had all of these and we left the theater about 10 mins in. I almost never do that, since I usually want to get my money's worth even if the movie stinks. I recently sat through the entire movie for Khatta Meeta - so go figure. :-) I am really waiting for Paranormal Activity 2 and this time I want to watch it in the theater.

When you get married or start living with another person, it's really surprising how much of the other person's personality rubs on you. The other day, I said something to S that was sort of a semi swearword in Thamizh and was surprised at how easily it rolled off my tongue. A few years ago I would have cringed if someone had said that in front of me. I think this just means that we have to go out more and talk to other people, lest we just become clones of each other. But on the good side, S is now familiar with all S.Ve. Sekar and Crazy Mohan dramas and fares really well in the Identify-which-drama-this-dialogue-is-from game.

There Srini, I kept my promise! :-)

Facebook

To People Who Ask Me Why I am Not Active on FB

1) I don't care about what's on your mind right now

2) I have already seen the cheesy youtube videos that you post

3) It's practically a punishment for me to look at 100 pics of your last vacation.

4) I don't want to look at pictures of your baby doing all sorts of things (unless it is my nephew A - seriously he is the cutest baby I've ever seen) If I thought babies were cute, I would have one of my own.

5) I have no interest in Mafia Wars, Farmvile or any other Loserville games

6) In the same vein, I don't care about any quiz you take and have no interest in know which Friends character I am like, or how well I know Vinnaithandi Varuvaya.

7) If I don't care enough to email you/ call you/IM you, it means I have no interest in your life whatsoever. And similarly if you had any interest at all in me, you would contact me in some way apart from liking my comments

8) On a more specific note, husband liking their wife's mindless FB update (and vice versa) is puke inducing. If S ever likes my comment of "Happy diwali/Karthigai/Pongal/.." I will kill him and then kill myself.

9) And what's with using a picture of you with your wife/gf as a profile pic. I know you are proud that you finally found some woman and managed to convince her to marry you. Are you so lame that you want to brag to the whole world that you finally got a woman?

10) If you are busy and post that on FB, I really wonder how busy you really are.

11) Most importantly, I have a life and have more important uses of my time. To quote Betty White in SNL "I would never say the people on it (FaceBook) are losers. But that’s only because I’m polite."

PS. Take this with a grain of salt everyone, I don't want a mob of torch wielding villagers picketing outside my apartment. This is just my pathetic attempt at humor - so humor me and get along with your lives . Also, I am just a little bit jealous that a hundred people comment on some guy's post about how he went out for coffee, but no-one reads or comments on the lovely, quality writing on my blog! :-)

PPS. To any family reading this blog, will send the West Virginia pics and video soon. If anyone is else is wondering about the WV post, oh who am I kidding! :-)