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Projects......

I went to work Tuesday morning at 7 am and got home at 3:00 PM Wednesday afternoon. I went back this morning as soon as I got up (around 8:00am) and finally finished around 6pm. The representative from HP left me a note that most of my interfaces didn't work because I had incorrect IP addresses programmed. I argued with HP and Oracle for hours over this and finally went to the MDF after realizing that every machine was visible on the network but what I had programmed as the default gateway wasn't reachable. HP moved a switch and the gateway to another set of racks but didn't bother to reconnect the switch to the gateway.

Between two on site HP technicians and a team of programmers from Oracle, none thought to check if they had all the cables plugged in. One cable, wrecked my four day weekend.

I think becoming relevant will take a mix of innovation, price, and luck.

Walmart won on price. Target is carving a whole in the market share by being trendy. Target is competitive in price, especially when you get their membership card. BestBuy won on price in its market. Amazon continues to cut into all these because of their price / convenience. All those folding lost the price war, plain and simple.

Innovation will be key when / if all these new laws / tariffs / trade propositions go into effect. When abroad stops being cheap all these guys will start having to raise price, or figure out loopholes. If an innovation akin to what the assembly line did for cars becomes realized in American manufacturing while imports go up would rocket the benefactor to the top of the heap.

Price - self explanatory.

Luck - there's a lot of moving parts, but a few words out of trumps mouth caused amazon to lose a billion. Some combination of laws falling in someone's favor with a decent marketing strategy and some revenue management could make the next alphabet / amazon / Walmart. Joining forces seems like a good idea but I can't think of an example where two failing companies combined to save one or both. Sears / Kmart was a flop, AOL Time Warner flop, crysler benz... typically a merger that doesn't involve a good company buying and stripping a failing company on the cheap or a good company buying a good company (think disney and everyone they've purchased) seems to have failed, at least in recent memory.

It seems like every furniture store goes out of business at least 10 times before it actually goes out of business

someone should offer a penny

For me, video games stir up emotions from the time period I was playing them, not necessarily what was going on in the game itself. For instance:

Dark Cloud - I played this game day and night. I was 20 / 21 years old when I found this game. It'd been out for a while but I'd completely missed it. I bought it a few days before the girl I'd been in love with since we were small kids decided we weren't a good fit anymore. We'd spent our entire teens together and I'd just bought a house for us. I was devastated. I took some time off of work and played Dark Cloud from start to finish. The roommate I had from college came over and hung out with me a lot. Between him and Dark Cloud I made it through.

Chrono Cross - I was playing this during my last few days living in a dorm. It was a bittersweet time. I was moving away from all the friends I'd made and the close proximity to the 24 /7 party to a new chapter in my life, completely unaware that the previous would happen and cause me to move the party to my house for the next 5 years.

Call of Duty World at War - I was playing this when my ex came in, turned it off, said she was pregnant, and went to bed. 16 months later I'm a single father with two kids. I treasure that game. In a round-about way it marks the beginning of the end of the worst relationship of my life.

By the time the discount gets good all that'll be left is power rangers and shoes for American girl dolls.

Same thing happend at our KMart. I waited until the 50 - 80% signs were up and saw a lot of empty shelves, dvds that had 29.99 price tags that half price was still double what they retailed for elsewhere, and the most random crap imaginable.

I bought an electric icecream maker for 5 - 10 dollars.

Earlier this morning I found a game cube with a bunch of games 3 n64 controls, 1 3rd party gcn controller, and a bunch of those plug into your tv controller / game combos for 12 bucks.

The games are crap, except for a complete copy of Metroid prime, and the gamecube was dirty and missing the center plastic piece on top that says Nintendo. Right now everything is being stored away, but when I get some time i'm going to completely disassemble and clean it up. The kid took great care of it as all the games had the cases and the instructions, there was nothing sticky on any of the games or consoles, and there was only one scratch on the console. I can't believe the condition it was in to be that dirty.

Outside of that I went to Toys R' Us today to check out the going out of business sale and walked away with a play and charge kit for my xbone as well as a copy of the Zelda collector's edition of monopoly.

I just got back from the Toys R' Us in Asheville and the liquidation is in full swing. The store looks to be already half empty and while the discount signs say up to 30% the majority of toys is 10%. Lego and other construction sets were at 5%, Easter was at 20% and almost gone, some off brand something had a tiny stand up from for 30% off and everything else was 10%.

I was looking for a shot of nostalgia but instead found sadness. It felt like walking through your dead grandmother's house during an estate sale. My kids didn't even seem all that jazzed. Parker got a bike and Chloe got a hand full of crap from the Claires section (yeah Toys R Us has a Claire's section) and they just weren't all that amazed.

I bought a play and charge for my xbone and the Zelda Monopoly game and really didn't save anything. The discounting wasn't enough to keep up with Walmart or Amazon. 

That legal wrangling was how Nintendo ended up with Tetris

Hey, another game added to my steam wishlist.

24.99 is rough for a rehash of a 15 year old game sooooo waiting for Steam sale

yeah, what ever happened to the ufo sighting? Crop circles used to be a thing too

2 play and charge kits for 360
2 360 battery packs
the fractured but whole for ps4

I like it, I took a looong break from the franchise and WW2 was my reentry point so it feels fresh.

If I ever have a third kid or another black eye it'll be Tequila's fault

yup, time to watch the Goonies again

Depressed, that's funny!

I think there's so many things I want to do, with the house, with the kids, at work, with life, and then there's so much i'm doing with all those mentioned things, that i either split my time up in really small chunks or sit around trying to figure out how where to go next.

The collectors editions were awesome looking, I just can bring myself to pay that much

its supposedly going to run Linux so it'll be an insanely expensive emulation machine

I'm still keeping my hopes up but I refuse to pay 300 for a raspberry pi that looks like a vcs

Ni No Kuni 2 - > 1 hour, at the open world looking map - decided to go up and check out that level 50 wyvern - immediately rage quit after being one shotted
Burnout Paradise - Still trying to love it - still just not loving it - played for another 15 minutes
Call of Duty WW2 - Played for 30 minutes, can't stop that stupid train
Sea of Thieves - didn't figure out how the game work till I set the controller down to watch a youtube video, came back just in time to watch a skeleton shoot me in the face
xbox 360 - kids wanted to try out oblivion - none of the rechargeable batteries had a charge, and all the play and charge cords were somewhere else

That was Sunday...

Today I made Spaghetti, took the daughter to cheer, and watched the son play Minecraft. Now i'm going to watch something on Prime or Netflix till I fall asleep. Games weren't good to me yesterday so we're taking some time apart!

That's funny.

I impulse bought a set of silicone ice trays to make those huge ice cubes and was super stoked about it. 2 fit in my Yeti and last the weekend.

Siempre hay que separa las drogas

its true, when my daughter was tiny I bought a small inflatable ball pit that came with enough balls to coat the bottom of it. When I upgraded the speakers in the living room I stored the old subwoofer in her closet.

@BLUEVOODU  IT WORKS!

@BLUEVOODO

same here, is it a permissions thing?

@bluevoodu

I just broke the hour mark in this game and I got to say it's pretty good. The combat is great and the Studio Gibili feel to the animation and story is awesome. I never played the first Ni No Kuni but I heard good things. After I'm done with this one I'll have to go back and revisit the first.

Outside of Secret of Mana theres not be tons recently to scratch that RPG itch so if anyone out there is looking for something Ni No Kuni 2 may be it.

@BLUEVOODU I'm game




not sure it works for me,

My problem is that I just can't get into anything anymore. I've tried playing Burnout Paradise, No No Kuni 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Mega Man Legacy collection 1&2, Monster Hunter World, Call of Duty WW2, Secret of Mana, everything else on the snes classic, on top of the entirety of my steam library and I just can't put more than a few hours into any of it.

modern content is what I'm most interested in. Will it be like a steam machine or a home console? 0 games have been announced so who's developing? At this point it seems April is too soon for preorders to start

It looks like you've still got a year on the march 8th deadline