Running through Disneyland Adventures on the XBox!

The Breakdown: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Disneyland Adventures is one of our IT Show 2012 loot that we have played quite extensively for the past few weeks now. In the It's a freebie we got from the IT Show -- thank you DBS/POSB!

In addition to the game, you also get a redemption code for 160 Microsoft Points (MSP). Not sure if that's standard issue for all Disneyland Adventures game, or if it's just an IT Show promo, or if it's a regional thing only. At any rate, free game + free MSP was enough reason for us to say "nice deal!"


The Flaws: Sensor Unsensing

Now the game. It's a Kinect game, so it pretty much has the same benefits and/or issues with any other Kinect game. However, this game has particularly annoying sensor issues. Even compared with the other Kinect games -- e.g. Kinect Adventures or Fruit Ninja -- the game has a hard time interpreting my moves. It can hardly distinguish me raising my hand for high fives with the characters (more on this later). Apparently, this has been seen by other players as well -- some have complained about this a lot in some of the forums I've checked.

In addition, there is some noticeable lag on specific games/areas. For example in the last leg of the Pirates of the Carribbean attraction where you have to swat away the bombs/grenades thrown at you, my avatar swats the bomb about a second too late so I often get, uhm, bombed away. This lag takes a little bit of getting used to.

One workaround I found to help was to re-calibrate the Kinect sensor after you have loaded the disc.

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IT Show 2012 Day 2

I tried my best to get as much pictures as possible. :)

My IT Show 2011 Loot - Sepom Photopapers

The best place to get cheap photopapers? Go to the SEPOM booth. Every year, they have always been on the 6th floor and always had the same offer.

Each pack of 20 A4 (standard bond paper size) photopapers sell between 15 and 20 dollars. It's either a "Buy-1-Take-1" or "Buy-2-Take-3"!

My IT Show 2011 Loot - Printer Inks

IT Shows are always a good place to get good deals for printers. Whether buying a new printer or buying supplies such as print cartridges and photo papers.

We have a Canon Pixma MP640 printer which has 5 separate print cartridges: 1 for b&w document printing and 4 for colored printing (CMY + black; yep that's two black inks).

It just so happens that they are still selling the set of print cartridge (code 821) for SGD 88 per set. You also get SGD 10 voucher for NTUC Fairprice. Not a bad deal.. So I bought two sets. :)

Daddy-to-Be's Long Reprieve

And it's another one of those times when I'm so no blogging for a long while. Not that I don't want to.I simply put it (blogging) off because I'm busy with something else. You know, important things that requires my utmost attention... sort of. :)

So what the hell have I been up to?

Birthday May
My birthday. My birth month. Yey! Yipee! Nothing unusual. Same old, same old celebration at the house with my wife. TV. Cake. Food. Never gets old! :)

Then towards the end of the month, we returned to good ol' Philippines -- way after the May 2010 elections. Our last visit was way back August 2009. Those were painful times for us... So at least now, it's good to look back at our last visit as a more pleasant one.

Unfortunately, the last visit was not without casualties. The touchscreen of Che's Nintendo DS Lite is broken. Well, not broken broken. Just that it can't detect the stylus accurately anymore. It's like there's always a stylus pointed at the upper left region of the screen, so when you're not doing anything, you will see the pointer always on that location. Oh well, I guess it's time to move on. I'm actually eyeing that new Nintendo DS XL. Not sure if the R4DS works on that as well though; haven't had the time to look into it yet...

Then there's this nagging cold and flu. I had this since before our flight home, but I thought I could get by with just Tempra Forte. Guess not. And the weather did not help at all. Raining slightly for ten minutes followed by intense sunlight everyday really did a number on me. Good thing I still get to drive the car... Wow, I missed driving!


Raining June
Yep, rain, rain, rain, and more rain. Good to know that by the time we left, it already started raining again in Manila... At least for the first few days, that is.

So we had the usual cleanup-after-returning-from-a-trip. A bit harder that usual since we're also rearranging stuff for the baby. :) We finally decided to get a Trends portable aircon for the master bedroom. And yes, we're living in a flat without an aircon for the last two years. So installing the portable aircon was a welcome change. It was fun installing the exhaust for the portable aircon; removing the dusty old roman curtain, covering the exhaust cover with printed foil cover (heh), and moving things around so we can place the aircon as close to the window as possible.

Then there's two events that keeps Singapore busy these days: the annual IT Show in Suntec City and, of course, the Great Singapore Sale (GSS). Things just got a bit busier. :)

We already planned this way back... The next big thing that we will buy is a videocam. And so, after much comparison, and weighing of the pros and cons, we finally decided on buying a shiny blue Sony HDR-CX150E. It's within our slightly tightening budget, lightweight, has an internal 16GB harddisk, supports both the Sony memory stick and the SD card, touchscreen, 3.1 Megapixels, 25x Optical zoom, Full HD (1080). And since it's the IT Show, we got a lot of freebies - extra batt, video frame, tripod, etc. And so there you have it. A good buy to suit our needs.

And the very first thing we shot: Che's ultrasound. After three previous sessions of failing to determine our baby's gender, we finally got a confirmation: IT'S A BOY! Hehehe :) And we got it all on tape -- or disk, whatever. :)

Then the ongoing GSS also got us busy. Preparing the baby stuff, choosing the crib and stroller, and more. All these considerations is sometimes abit hard to swallow... Oh well, part of being a new dad. :)

Then on top of these all, there's one other thing we are having a hard time with: what will be the baby's name? We've narrowed down it down to about ten combinations -- we decided that baby should have two first names, so as to avoid the problem I had with NBI Clearance: if your name is too common, chances are, somewhere around the country, there is another person with the same name. :)

So there you have it. The things that got me all riled up. :) Hopefully I can get to post something more often. I do have some opinions about what's happening around. I'm still deciding whether I should publish it or not, though. :)

Good day!