Thus, the quest. How can I remove a song from my library of downloaded material?

I spent a while with google looking for tips. Unfortunately most of what I found was written before the XBox interface got wii-ified, so the choices were not the same. Even if I found instructions that seemed to fit they weren’t working for me. Ultimately I found a brief note from someone that said to clean up my downloaded material I had to select “Rock Band” as the game title rather than “Rock Band 2″ after I opened up my hard drive settings. I figured that couldn’t work, since I was downloading songs for Rock Band 2, but when I followed those instructions I found all of the songs that I had downloaded were there.

There was the song, and a few button clicks later it was gone.

As a bonus, I also learned during the search process that I can browse downloadable songs from within the game itself, and that lets me see what the difficulty ratings are as well as check out a preview of the song too. I finally realized that “Baba O’Reilly” by The Who was really “Teenage Wastland” that way.

They knew O’Bannon – his tendencies, his number 31, even the mechanics of his lefty jump shot – from playing a video game that featured classic college teams.

“They literally played me on a video game,” O’Bannon told Yahoo! Sports on Saturday. “You could play the ’95 Bruins. It didn’t have my name, but it had my number, left-handed, it looked like me. It was everything but the name.

“My friend kind of looked at me and said, ‘you know what’s sad about this whole thing? You’re not getting paid for it.’ I was just like, ‘wow, you’re right.’ It just kind of weighed on me.”

Fourteen years after O’Bannon left college, the NCAA, which profited handsomely off him as a student-athlete, was still profiting handsomely off him as a former student-athlete. They’d made a deal with EA Sports to feature that UCLA club. There were also O’Bannon jerseys, commemorative DVDs and full game footage still for sale.

From reading the rest of the article it seems that the NCAA has regularly been able to defend its actions in featuring current athletes because it “protects their amateur status” but that argument fails when dealing with graduates. It sounds like a slam-dunk (pun) case to me.

It has attracted some really high-profile lawyers too, so guess who will get all the money.

Making NCAA pay?, Dan Wetzle column

There’s only one problem. I can’t listen to the radio at this point without visualizing the fretbar with the colored jewels scrolling towards me anymore…

The xBox has been wii-ified. The old interface is gone, and the new interface has obviously taken some cues from the Wii. I’m not sure yet if that’s a good or bad thing.

Most rechargable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles. But I would think that they’re supposed to last more than six months. I’ve eliminated a cable or controller issue by swapping things around, and whenever I try to use this one particular battery it… well, it just doesn’t work. I can use it plugged in via the USB cable, but then I can’t sit across the room on the comfy couch.

Anyway, batteries are not that expensive, as far as XBox360 accessories go, so getting a couple of new ones didn’t set me back that much. It’s just surprising that they wore out so quickly.

I have many fond memories of playing the game into the wee hours of the morning. I have what feels like acres of shelf space dedicated to D&D books and other materials. I have created worlds.

Thank you, Gary.

Fast forward to now. I got an Xbox 360. I don’t know whether to type XBOX or xbox or XBox or xBox or what, so I will go with XBox 360 and assume that everyone knows what I am talking about.

My wife suggested that she might get me an XBox for my Christmas present last year, and I asked her to do something different instead. I have a lot of demands on my time and I didn’t think getting a game console would have helped that. So what changed this year?

Our boys are a year older, and they’ve been playing some computer games (they have their own computer with some age-appropriate games) and doing fairly well. I thought that we could get some games for the XBox that would be appropriate and it would be something we could do together as a family. There are also some rather sedate arcade games that my wife would enjoy, or so I thought. So we picked up an XBox a few weeks ago.

So far everything that I envisioned has come true. The boys and I have been playing Cars (from the Pixar movie) and having a great time. I’ve played a little bit of Forza 2 (it came with the purchase) and am bidding on a Microsoft Wheel on eBay to enhance that experience. My wife has played Hexic and Bejeweled, and enjoys them both.

And yes, I have wasted entirely too much time enjoyed playing a game or two myself over the past few weeks.

Now I just have to get set up with a wireless adapter so I can get rid of the network cable snaking from the living room into the office…

Related Links

• Wiki on Pac-Man

I finally got to watch Ratatouille over the Thanksgiving break. It was an enjoyable movie. I don’t think I’ve watched a Pixar film yet that I didn’t like, even if the original premise seemed strange they always seem to pull it off. When I first read about the movie plot (A rat. In Paris. Who is a chef?) I will admit to being very skeptical. But it really was a good story.

The hard part was finding out which character was voiced by John Ratzenberger this time. He played Mustafa (a play on Mufasa from the Lion King?), the waiter in the restaurant. You may or may not have realized this, but John Ratzenberger (best known as “Cliff the mailman” from Cheers) has voiced a character in every single Pixar film released so far. Mufasa was, of course, voiced by James Earl Jones, and was the original lion king from the Disney movie from several years back. Disney has sinced purchased Pixar (for 8 billion with a “B” dollars) and so I am curious if this was an attempt at an inside joke of some sort.

The parts that John Ratzenberger has voiced in each Pixar movie to date (in reverse chronological order) are:

Ratatoiille – Mustafa, the head waiter
Cars – Mack, the truck
Incredibles – Underminer
Finding Nemo – School of fish
Monsters, Inc. – Abominable Snowman
Toy Story 2 – Hamm the piggy bank
Bug’s Life – P. T. Flea

Come to think of it, it was a natural for “Ratz”enberger to voice a character in a movie about rats in Paris, right?