First, download the 360 drivers for Windows. Install it and accept all the defaults.

Next, grab this nice driver for the drum kit. Save it to your hard drive, plug in your drum kit, and tell it where the drum kit driver is.

Finally go and get the drum machine. It’s awesome.

I, on the other hand, had to hack some things up a bit. My setup is a bit different. I have a media PC in the living room that has a wireless connection to the network. My XBox is connected to the media PC by a small Ethernet cable. I was using Microsoft’s Internet Connection Sharing, a feature built into Windows XP and that wasn’t working for me at all.

I got a tip from a Google search that I could drop the connection sharing and create a Network Bridge. Selecting the wired and wireless connections in the Networking control panel lets you create a bridge which joins both networks together. Pretty neat concept, but it didn’t work.

It turns out that neither of my network connections were compatible with this setup by default, but Microsoft has a way to for you to fix that. At a command prompt, you just type this:

netsh bridge show adapter

Then take note of each adapter and issue this command for each one

netsh bridge set adapter forcecompatmode=enable

In my case, I had two adapters, #1, and #2. I entered these commands:

netsh bridge set adapter 1 forcecompatmode=enable
netsh bridge set adapter 2 forcecompatmode=enable

The result? BAM! We were able to chat. Tomorrow night we’re going to try some gaming. Should be a blast!

If you want to play sometime, my XBox ID is hoganbp.

Play RaidenX

Carissa, meanwhile, pulled a muscle in her back sometime yesterday / last night. She woke up and couldn’t get out out bed. Since she was in no shape to take care of Ana, let alone herself, I decided that it would be best for all involved if I stayed home and took care of them, even though this puts me even farther behind than I’d like to be.

Simpsons was good this week. It was fun watching it with Ana. This would be the first time, though, that I purposly did not record the show to VHS. Since I have the DVDs and the DIVx copies of the show (which I will replace when the DVDs do come out), I never watch the tapes anymore. And that’s just as well considering that the quality of the tapes have degraded from almost constant watching.

I started playing Raven Shield which I like so much better than Ghost Recon. It’s less frustrating because the action takes place indoors or in smaller areas, and I like the extra control I have over my teams. Being able to plan the missions is a really cool feature.

• Like Tetris, but backwards! This game is AWESOME!
• Another awesome Tetris variant
• Stop those AOL CDs
• Facts about Numbers

I love my iPod, and I love my mp3s, so you can imagine how excited I was when I heard that iTunes for the PC was coming out. I installed it and was almost immediately disappointed. Here’s why:

• iTunes, like the iPod, uses a flat library to store your songs. It uses ID3 tags to catalog your songs into albums, genres, and artists. However, in the library itself, there’s no subfolder support. That maks it difficult to find songs unless ALL of your songs have correct tag information.
• It’s resorce-heavy. iTunes takes up a lot more space in memory than it should considering it’s supposed to be a media player. THe problem, of course, is that it’s trying to be a cd-ripper, mp3 organizer, and cd-burning software as well as a media player, and all of those things take up memory.
• Deleting a playlist from your iPod does not give you the option to delete the SONGS from the playlist
• Running iTunes with an iPod connected automatically replaced my nicely ordered list of playlists with an alphabetized list of my playlists WITHOUT PROMPTING ME.
• It’s just like MusicMatch. Look at the features list and tell me it’s any different… I dare you. Music Store doesn’t count, sorry.
• Music you buy comes to you in AAC files that you can’t convert to mp3 files without first burning them to a CD and re-ripping them. The music store also only has popular stuff. Nothing that I looked for was available.

It’s not all bad. It’s a great sounding music player, it rips CDs into AAC or MP3, and it hooks into the Music Store. If you’re a casual music listener or you rip your own music collection, you may really like this program. If you have a lot of songs like me, stick with Windows Explorer, EphPOD, and Tag&Rename.

Wesley Clark announces bid for presidency

Retired four-star general and former NATO commander Wesley Clark announced
that he would seek the Democratic nomination for presidency. He may be a long-shot
candidate coming in just four months prior to the first caucus in Iowa, but
his experience as a military leader could help offset George W. Bush’s status
as a war-time commander. Grass-roots "Draft Clark" movements have raised more
than $1 million in funds for his campaign.