A Leslie Wong Blog

I applied the NXE (New Xbox Experience) update last month to Chris’ Xbox 360 and created my new avatar. I tried to photograph it with our Nikon D70 but the moire was so bad, I didn’t want to take the time to try to fix it in Photoshop.

I went to xbox.com and did a PrtSc of my gamer profile (leapingmonkeys) page to capture my avatar.

The sad thing is, this is what I actually look like.

I don’t really listen to rock music anymore. My tastes in rock were formed by listening to KSAN and KYA in San Francisco during the late 60’s. When I moved to New York in 1975, I started listening to jazz.

The last rock LP (vinyl to you punk kids) I bought was Thriller, when it came out in 1982. The New York Times’ John Rockwell praised the album in his review, so I went to King Karol on 42nd Street and bought it. It seems you can still get the Thriller LP at Amazon.com (vinyl, I think).

So that brings me, 25 years later, to Halo 3. Still affected by the mass media, I read Ars Technica’s Halo 3 review and I pre-ordered it from Amazon.

DHL delivered it today. It’s my 4.11176471 x 10^-8 contribution to Microsoft. That’s my $59.99 part of the $170M first day sales of Halo 3.

I must be playing Gears of War too much. Everytime I see our propane tanks, I want to shoot them.

I had the Xbox 360 and Forza Motorsport 2 part.

But in Forza Motorsport 2, I was unable to drive with an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller. For some reason, steering with my left thumb (maybe the kids can do it), caused me to always over-correct. I thought the solution would be the more natural car interface, the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel.

Now I find that if your Xbox is connected to a large screen TV, having the steering wheel on your lap or clamped to a table doesn’t work very well. This guy’s Ulitmate Xbox 360 Racing Setup looks like it’d be OK.

Now I have to find a racing seat.

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The Forza Motorsport 2 Demo for the XBox 360 became available yesterday on Xbox Live. It’s a 691 MB download.

Last month, Forzamotorsport.net published the Forza Motorsport 2 Official Car List – 310 cars. No Alfas.

I’m looking forward to driving the 1969 Ferrari Dino 246 GT and the 1961 Jaguar E-type S1. It looks like I’ll be forced to get an Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel by May 29, the release date.

I was watching Bill Gates’ CES keynote today and Justin Hutchinson, group product manager of Windows Client at Microsoft, demonstrated some Vista features that I hadn’t seen before.

Hutchinson controlled a live.com Virtual Earth 3D fly-over of Las Vegas with an Xbox 360 controller (There was tepid applause). Chris just got an Xbox 360 for Christmas and we’ve been playing Gears of War and Lara Croft Tomb Raider LEGEND, so I thought at least we can get our money’s worth using the Xbox 360 controller on our PCs.

I found drivers for Vista and XP at Microsoft downloads. Microsoft has an KB article on How to connect an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows to a computer. Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller must need a dongle to work with a PC