confidentialmisanthropy

But enough talk... Have at you!

I've been in possesion of an Xbox 360 for roughly a month now in a country where it's spectacularly underachieving and I have to say I'm pretty enamored with it hardware-wise. I don't currently have a HDTV and having never really owned one I really don't know what difference it makes. It's completely capable of earning kudos from staunch MS haters and naysayers on a conventional television. What I'm really impressed with, though, is the UI. It's slick as hell and beyond anything anybody's ever done.

I picked up Call of Duty 2 and Ridge Racer 6 from the jump 'cause they were pretty much no-brainers. I feel like Rare jumped the shark sometime between Star Fox Adventures and Grabbed by the Ghoulies so I'm steering clear of their '360 stuff regardless of the glowing reviews Perfect Dark 0 is raking in. Call me crazy...

DOA4 is my current addiction. It caught me by suprise, honestly, 'cause I've always considered it (as a series) to be a tact-less Virtua Fighter rip-off. DOA4 is a whole 'nother story altogether. It's hardcore. It's the first 3D fighter since Soul Calibur that I can honestly say came really balanced without any patches or nerfs. There's virtually no danger of some novice button-mashing out a victory against a seasoned player. I hear there's alot of hiccups with the game on Live but I'm not really looking forward to fighting hordes of Hayabusa addicts anyway, so for now I'll have to settle for beating up on the roomates.

If January is a sign of things to come, this year is going to be quite the roller-coaster. It wasn't a good month to be a 7th Fleet Sailor, that's for certain. The only way I can possibly comment positively about all that happened is that it remedied my indecision on whether or not to stay in Japan for my next tour. The backlash and the resulting restrictions have pretty much disuaded me from any more tours in Seventh Fleet. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely love living in Japan, but duty out here (well... Sea Duty anyway) is far too arduous to have to deal with so much red tape in homeport.

On top of the PR fiasco, I had my own disaster in the form of an Exchange Server crash while I was still on leave (locally). I spent the last week of my leave at work, ironically. I'd intended on simply scratching the remainder of it but about half-way through the week I realized all our efforts for data restoration were futile. We'd essentially been backing up corrupted data, overwriting anything that would have fixed things. Exchange 5.5 is a notoriously unforgiving program when it comes to database corruption. I never, at any point sugar-coated the issue to my chain of command. My department head, who apparently majored in Imbecility at the Academy, told me to my face that I didn't know what I was talking about, and that there were "other ways" to "find" the data. I informed him the data wasn't "lost", it was corrupt; but he wanted a second opinion. The best way to get a second opinion on something for a "know-it-all" J.O. is to get a civilian to tell them. Ex-Navy civilians that have been in your position before are even better, 'cause they tell it like it is. So I had an Ex-Navy friend of mine come in and take a look and he deduced the same thing and briefed LT Imbecile accordingly with the same diagnosis I'd given him days prior. He just knida walked away, not giving me the satisfaction, but I'll chalk it up as a moral victory.