EA Sports

Sometime ago, I vowed not to buy EA Sports' games full-price.

This year, it's looking increasingly likely that I'll have to renege on that.

Madden NFL 11 has the new GameFlow and Game Planning features. NHL 11 has properly implemented Free Agency. FIFA 11 has a new passing system.

And all of them are priced at $69.99. Damn.

Boxing Day, maybe.

2012 (The Movie)

Not impressed.

The science is crap. The plot is crap. The writing is crap. The acting is crap. But I guess that was all to be expected in a film where the focus is digital effects, which sometimes also bordered on crap.

It had nothing even to do with 2012 and the supposed Mayan prophecy of the end of the world, except that the events depicted in the film had the numbers "2012" conveniently flashed across the screen before it all went to hell.

Oh, and not to mention that the writers (Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser) were too pussy to destroy Mecca, but were completely OK toppling the statue of Jesus in Rio and knocking out the Tibetan monk's humble abode in the Himalayas. Yeah, obviously because Christians/Catholics and Buddhists are a little more tolerant than Muslims.

Oh, this just in (well it's not news, but I just found out) - Roland Emmerich is gay.

Couldn't have put that better myself.

Cherry

What does Don Cherry represent? What does Don Cherry stand for?

Does Don Cherry represent Canada? Does Don Cherry stand for the Canadian way of life?

I hope not. Don Cherry just comes across as a grumpy old man, a septogenarian curmudgeon who has a singular idea of what Canadians are: gap-toothed, hard-working, win-at-all-cost hockey players who wear their hearts and patriotism (among other things) on their sleeves.

I don't think Don has looked around metropolitan Canada in the past 30 years. I don't think he's even close to understanding what it means to be "Canadian" these days.

I would not be surprised if Don admitted he didn't realize Adrienne Clarkson, the 26th Governor General of Canada, was Chinese.

Wake up, Don. Enough of the European-bashing. It's one thing to be proudly Canadian; it's another to portray all Europeans as pussies who whine and dive and wear visors and won't drop the gloves (though Alex Semin wasn't helping).

You don't represent Canada. You don't represent Canadian ideals. You may be fiercely proud of your small-town Canadian roots, but small-town Canada no longer represents Canada as a whole. Nearly half of the country's population now live in the ten most populous cities in the country. That's more than the total population from less than 60 years ago.

You may be entertaining. You may be controversial. You may even be entertaining because you're controversial. But times are passing you on, and until you are ready to admit that maybe there are other ways to play hockey and other ways to live life, you'll always go down as a stubborn grouch in my books.

New Lows

Liverpool have hit new lows with their Carling Cup exit at the hands of League Two Northampton Town. That's three divisions below the Premier League.

You'd think that Pepe Reina, Jamie Carragher, Steven Gerrard, and Fernando Torres is a pretty good spine to build a team around.

But they've lost the two key midfield ingredients in Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano and failed to adequately replace them. And things are just falling apart.

Is the lack of transfer funds to blame for their failures? Or is it the poor use of available funds?

I lean towards the latter. Benitez spent the past six years and over 200 million pounds on mostly second-rate players (read: Luis Garcia, Scott Carson, Peter Crouch, Dirk Kuyt, Jermaine Pennant, Ryan Babel, Martin Skrtel, Andrea Dossena, Albert Riera, etc.) and washed-up veterans (read: Fernando Morientes, Bolo Zenden, Robbie Fowler, Robbie Keane, Craig Bellamy, etc.). The only true world-class players signed during his tenure were Alonso, Mascherano, and Torres.

Instead of building a team with a top-class Starting XI, Benitez went for a bloated squad filled with mediocre players. In contrast, besides bringing in Michael Carrick, Owen Hargreaves, and Dimitar Berbatov in successive seasons (comparable players, if not in style then at least in stature), Fergie also brought in the likes of Wayne Rooney, Edwin van der Saar, Park Ji-Sung, Nemanja Vidic, Patrice Evra, Anderson, Nani, and Antonio Valencia. Not to mention the departed Gerard Piqué, Giuseppe Rossi, and Ben Foster.

So let's compare.

Alonso + Mascherano + Torres: Nearly 50 million pounds

Carrick + Hargreaves + Berbatov: Over 60 million pounds

The United trio cost a little more, sure. But fairly close. The rest of them?

Garcia + Carson + Crouch + Kuyt + Pennant + Babel + Riera + Morientes + Keane + Bellamy: Over 90 million pounds

Rooney + van der Saar + Park + Vidic + Evra + Anderson + Nani + Valencia: Nearly 100 million pounds

Ouch.

Toss in Alberto Aquilani (20 million) and the scale gets tipped the other way.

Is the lure of playing at Old Trafford really that much greater than playing at Anfield that, given a choice, a player would snub Liverpool in favour of United? I doubt it. I think it's purely a case of spending poorly.

Can you imagine if Liverpool had signed even just half of the players on United's list? (Anyone except Rooney: I can't imagine he would go from Everton to Liverpool. He'd never make it to the red half of Merseyside alive.)

Bottom line: Benitez spent his money on second-rate players and made Liverpool a second-rate club.

Remember: You are what you eat.

Plans For Tonight

Father-in-law is coming in tonight, so the plans are for us to vacuum the basement once more and run the air purifier for a few hours, and start moving things back into their rightful places with the carpets now in-place.

The shelves should hopefully be dry now - its second layer of paint was done on Saturday night - so we can put things on it and get everything hooked up. We still need to mount the surround speakers onto the ceiling, but that'll have to wait till the weekend at the earliest, after my father-in-law has left.

Subtitles

Ran into a major roadblock with the KDVD's.

I guess it was a stroke of luck (or not) that the first set of KDVD's I tried to convert into KSongLover-compatible MPEG-2 files did not utilize subtitle streams for subs, but rather, the lyrics were encoded directly onto the video streams, of which there were two. All that was required was selecting the right Angle prior to demuxing and all was well.

However, I popped in another set of KDVD's today and found that it used subtitle streams, which can be demuxed into .SUB files by DVD Decrypter, but there is no lossless way to re-mux it into an MPEG-2 file (perhaps because MPEG-2 files cannot carry subtitles?).

As far as I can tell, I must re-encode the video with the subtitles laid on top. I have yet to figure out how.

Basement Update

So... carpets are getting put in early next week (or possibly this weekend), which means I've gotta move everything downstairs out of the way. We threw out most of the cardboard boxes (except for the pretty ones) and we'll toss the packaging material tonight. After that, all the cables need to be disconnected and everything put away into storage until the carpets are in.

All the necessary pieces are slowly coming in. I'll be dropping by Ikea to look at shelving material as well as the sofa bed after work.

England Squad Missing John Terry and Frank Lampard

That's good news to me. Now if only an injury would befall Ashley Cole.

But can anyone tell me what Matthew Upson is doing still in the squad?

I would love to see Fabio Capello try something like playing Carrick, Gerrard, and Barry all in the middle of the pitch, with Milner and (Adam) Johnson out wide and switching wings every now and then.

Premiership 25-man Squad List

Here's the new Premier League Home-Grown Rule as found on premierleague.com:

"Premier League Clubs agreed, from season 2010/11, to introduce the following rules governing squad numbers and Home Grown Players.

• Each Club must submit a squad by 5pm on 1st September containing no more than 17 players who do not fulfill the Home Grown Player criteria. The remainder of the squad, up to a total of 25 players, must be Home Grown.
• A Home Grown Player means a player who, irrespective of his nationality or age, has been registered with any club affiliated to the Football Association or the Football Association of Wales for a period, continuous or not, of three entire seasons or 36 months prior to his 21st birthday (or the end of the Season during which he turns 21).
• Changes to the squad list of 25 may be made during the period of a Transfer Window.
• U21 players are eligible over and above the limit of 25 players/squad.
• For the 2010/11 campaign Under 21 players will have been born on or after 1st January 1989."

(Any emphasis mine)

What a completely useless rule and an utter, utter waste of everyone's time.

The most obvious counter-argument to the effectiveness of this rule is in the squad submitted by Arsenal, which included only 20 players over the age of 21. Of those 20, only 7 qualified as "Home Grown", and of those 7, none were even English.

Let me say that again: The rule created to supposedly ensure young English players are given better chances resulted in Arsenal registering 20 players in their 25-man squad, none of whom were English.

(Of course, in addition to the 20, Arsenal also registered a further 56 players aged 21 or younger.)

See, the way the rule is reading, it seems a club can even get away with not registering any "Home Grown" players, nevermind English, as long as they do not register more than 17 "non-Home Grown" players.

Which is completely different from saying a club must register no less than 8 "Home Grown" players.

The other problem, of course, lies in the definition of "Home Grown". As it stands, "Home Grown" is any player, regardless of nationality, who has been registered to an English (or Welsh) club for 3 full seasons or 36 months before the end of the season in which he turns 21.

Which means, you can sign him from anywhere in the world, as long as you sign him at the start of the season in which he turns 19, and he'll still count as "Home Grown".

How exactly does encouraging managers to tempt 16, 17, 18-year-olds away from their home countries and into English club academies promote the development of young English players?

If I were the manager of an English Premiership club (and I am, in the fantasy world known as FM), I would just stockpile the best young foreign talent, hoarding them from the young age of 16, 17, or 18, and unload any English youngsters who can't make the grade amongst them.

Oh wait, isn't that what Wenger does? Do the names Fabregas, Bendtner, Clichy and Denilson ring any bells??

Just saw Chelsea's squad list, and it brings us back to the first point: Chelsea only registered 4 "Home Grown" players. Four. Plus 17 "non-Home Grown" players. Exactly the kind of abuse I thought would happen. But at least all four of them were English.

Surprisingly, even Man City were able to register 12 "Home Grown" players.

Someone needs to do a study on the number of English man-games in the 2010-11 season compared to previous years.

Foreigners

"I just think we should always have one because it's cheating in a way. If we couldn't score goals, are we allowed to get Italy's centreforward? We're not, are we? Or get Gianluigi Buffon in goal?"
- Jamie Carragher, English and Liverpool defender, on whether or not the English national football team should have an English manager instead of a foreign one

Jamie's opinion, of course, flies in the face of the fact that, across many disciplines of sports, at various professional and amateur levels, national representatives have used and are using foreign coaches to reach the pinnacle.

The examples are so spectacularly numerous that I won't bother gathering case studies, but rather simply discuss the merits of the comment itself.

Why, exactly, must a national team be managed by someone born in that nation? Or even someone of that nationality (a naturalized citizen, perhaps)?

Of course we know of the cases where foreigners have come to represent national teams, even on the playing field:

• Marcos Senna (Brazilian) and Mariano Pernía (Argentine) for Spain
• Deco (Brazilian) for Portugal
• Santos (Brazilian, again) for Japan
• Gonzalo Higuaín (French-born to Argentine father) for Argentina
• Mauro Camoranesi (Argentine-born with Italian ancestry) for Italy
• Kevin-Prince Boateng (German-born to Ghanaian father) for Ghana
• Lukas Podolski and Piotr Trochowski (both Polish) for Germany
• Cacau (Brazilian) for Germany
• Alfredo Di Stéfano (Argentine) for Colombia and Spain

That's by no means a comprehensive list, but a fairly significant one, nevertheless.

If the above footballers were able to represent other countries simply by becoming a naturalized citizen, why are we limiting ourselves to domestically-born coaches and managers when the regulations regarding their nationalities are not nearly as stringent as the ones regarding the players?

Another topic of debate lately has been whether Mikel Arteta, eligible after spending five years at Everton, should be called up to the England squad. Some have called against it, again bringing up the whole "foreigners in the English game stunting development of young English players" load of crock.

If Arteta is eligible and is better than the other options, I don't see a reason why they shouldn't call him up, as other nations have done with their naturalized citizens. The biggest difference, of course, is the fact that Spain and English have no historical ties with each other, unlike the aforementioned examples.

What we really need to ask is, if England wins a championship (finally) with foreigners (naturalized or otherwise) in the squad or at the helm, will it taint their victory in any way? Will the English people begrudge the players in the squad, especially the foreigners, for their success?

On the evidence of how negative some of their reactions have been, I'd say it's altogether possible. Even if a foreigner is willing to play for or coach the English team, the English people are far too close-minded to plump for him, let alone celebrate his success with the team. Just look at the initial reaction to Sven-Göran Eriksson's appointment.

Last word: Jamie, it's not "cheating" if there's no rule against it. Stop self-imposing rules and limitations to hamper your own chance for success. It makes you look unambitious.

MPEG-2 Works

Loaded the MPEG-2 files into KSongLover, and everything worked once I got the video decoder set up properly. Voice/accomp. switching worked as expected.

Now it's just a matter of crunching through all the file conversions...

The Case of Zlatan

"... until Ibrahimovic arrived, they (Inter) hadn't won anything." - Zlatan Ibrahimovic, speaking of himself and his former club, upon joining their local rivals Milan.

Whenever you hear someone speak of himself in the third-person, you pretty much know the guy's full of himself.

In the case of Zlatan, is he correct in saying that he deserves much credit for Inter's success during the three years he spent at Guiseppe Meazza?

More concisely, did Inter win because of Zlatan, or did Inter win in spite of Zlatan?

I'm still of the opinion that Zlatan, while having a terrific goals-to-game ratio in top European leagues (157 goals in 300 league games), is not the big-game player that some make him out to be. His 22 goals in 76 European matches is an indication of his relative lack of success on the biggest stage in club football.

23 goals in 63 caps, including 13 coming in 9 games against the likes of Azerbaijan, Hungary, Iceland, Malta, and San Marino. That's 10 international goals in 54 matches that mattered.

4 goals in 7 European Championship starts all came in the group stage, while also missing a penalty in the Euro 2004 quarter-final shoot-out against Holland. He played all three games for Sweden in World Cup 2006, without scoring a goal.

So, do I think Zlatan is going to help Milan win anything? Well, consider the fact that he has won the league title in four consecutive seasons (Inter 2007, 08, 09, and Barcelona 2010), then consider the fact that Barcelona won the Champions League before he arrived and Inter won it after he left. Let's just say I wouldn't bet on Milan winning the Champions League this season.

Xbox 360 Games I Look Forward To

Thought I should make a list of all the games coming out soon that I probably won't get to play till next year, what with the baby coming and all.

Soon-to-be-released:
Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Have yet to buy:
Alan Wake
Army of Two: The 40th Day
Bayonetta
Bioshock 2
Dante's Inferno
Fable II (Game of the Year Edition released, but only in Europe?)
Final Fantasy XIII
Halo 3

Halo: Reach
Mass Effect 2
Modern Warfare 2
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
Splinter Cell: Conviction

Have yet to play:
Assassin's Creed II
The Beatles: Rock Band
Batman: Arkham Asylum ($38.83+gst)
Bioshock ($19.99+gst)
Dead Space ($9.99+gst)
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition (PC: $25 USD on Steam)
Gears of War 2 ($19.99+gst)
Halo 3: ODST
Left 4 Dead (PC: $5.10 USD on Steam)
Left 4 Dead 2 (PC: $5.10 USD on Steam)
Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 ($19.99+gst)

Have yet to finish:
Assassin's Creed ($6.90+gst)
Burnout Paradise
Devil May Cry 4
Dynasty Warriors 6 (bought used)
Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires ($29.99+gst)
Forza Motorsport 3
GRAW (bought used)
GRAW 2
Guitar Hero World Tour (complete band kit w/ 2-yr extended warranty for $59 + gift cards)
Lego Batman
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
Lost Odyssey ($9.99+gst)
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (rented once)
Mass Effect ($9.99+gst)
Need For Speed: Shift (bought used)
Rainbow Six: Vegas (bought used)

Finished but achievements left to farm:
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty: World at War (bought Collector's Edition for $24.99+gst)
Gears of War
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Uncaged Edition

Not gonna bother:
Bully: Scholarship Edition (boring)
Dead Rising (boring)
Forza Motorsport 2 (once I get Forza 3)

The sheer number of RPG's in the lists above means I'm doomed to never actually clear the lists completely.

Not to mention... X-Men Legends II on PC... and maybe even Fable and Jade Empire.

Gosh.

Whoever said video-gaming didn't require discipline?

Converting KDVD into KSongLover-compatible Media Files

Since KSongLover doesn't seem to support VOB files (and even if it did, it would not support switching between language tracks, which is how most KDVDs implement voice/accompaniment-only channels), I've been exploring ways to convert VOB files into KSL-compatible formats, namely MPEG-1/2. MPEG-1 definitely works with KSL, since that's really just KVCD format. I have yet to test MPEG-2 files with KSL, but I've gone ahead and tried to convert VOB files into MPEG-2 anyway.

I tried a bunch of tools, including (but may not be limited to... it was late at night and my memory might be lossy):

• DVD Decrypter
• VOB2MPG
• TMPGEnc
• PX3's AC3 to WAV
• Audacity
• ImagoMPG-Muxer
• EncWAVtoAC3 (essentially Aften)

At the point, it seems easiest to do the following:

1. Using DVD Decrypter, extract the video (choosing the angle with karaoke lyrics) and the audio streams (both voice and accompaniment AC3 stereo tracks) into demux'ed M2V and AC3 files.
2. The M2V file is good, we don't want to re-encode it or touch it in anyway; the AC3 files, on the other hand, need to be combined into a single wave file, with the accompaniment on the left channel and the voice on the right channel.
3. To do that, first convert the two AC3 files (for the two language tracks) to WAV's, using PX3. This will yield two stereo WAV files.
4. Using Audacity, import both WAV files. Pan one track (most likely the accompaniment) all the way to the left, and the other all the way to the right. Export as a single WAV file.
5. Now we need to convert the WAV file back into AC3 so it can be combined with the video into an MPEG-2 file. Use EncWAVtoAC3 (or Aften in command-line) to do this. Note: I tried mucking about with the options at first, especially the channel settings, but I had trouble getting it to encode. I found that the default options actually worked best.
6. At this point, the AC3 file should play properly in a DVD-player software such as Cyberlink's PowerDVD, with voice only on one channel (in my case, the right side).
7. Using ImagoMPG-Muxer, select the M2V file as the video source and the new AC3 file as the audio source. Make sure the output format is selected as MPG, then just Multiplex!
8. Et voila! Try playing the MPG file in a DVD-Player software (again, like PowerDVD) and you should have it all: video with lyrics, accompaniment on the left speaker, and voice on the right.

So there you have it, eight simple steps. Of course, like I said, I still have to test it on KSL.

You'll notice that two of the tools I tried weren't used in the final procedure: VOB2MPG and TMPGEnc. The reason being that both involved re-encoding the video stream, which I felt was unnecessary for our purposes - we really just want to move some audio channels around. Demuxing and muxing, I felt, kept the highest possible fidelity with regards to video.

Oh, and the other reason neither VOB2MPG and TMPGEnc were used was because both cost money to get the full feature-set. :-P

P.s. (2:29PM) I found out why Media Player played the MPG file with the left and right channels blending into each other - I had misconfigured ffdshow. My bad. All is well.

KSongLover

Tried to install HomeKara2, ran into all kinds of problems, not worth my time.

Went on to try KSongLover, looks really good so far. We loaded in a Chilam Cheung KTV VCD, everything worked great. Gonna order their remote+receiver now.

Old PC Outputs to Monitor + TV

So, after a little Googling, successfully configured my old PC for output to both the 19" monitor (DVI-D) and the 47" HD TV (VGA). The GeForce 6200 AGP is actually capable of driving both the 1680 x 1050 over DVI-D and the 1920 x 1080 over VGA. I'm impressed.

Next up, testing out some Karaoke software. Right now I'm looking at KSongLover and HomeKara2. Once I figure out which one we want, we'll order a remote/receiver set to go with it.

PC HDMI Audio w/ Radeon HD 4870

Downloaded Realtek's ATI HDMI Audio drivers and HDMI works silky smooth. PowerDVD is able to bitstream Dolby Digital and DTS to the Denon receiver.

Now the question is whether Windows Media Player is able to do the same, so I don't have to buy PowerDVD. But I do like the picture output by PowerDVD and the enhancement options it provides. I could go with the Standard edition for $50 and get all the functionalities I need.

Of course, I should look at other options as well. One of which is DVD X Player, which claims to be an all-region player. Worth a look.

To-Do List for Tonight

• Hook up Acer PC to receiver.
• Try HDMI connection for audio.
• Remove Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS PCI card from old PC and test on Acer PC.

Update; Home Theatre work to be done

It's been soooo long since I last posted on here I feel ashamed of myself.

Joyce and I are trying to get our house in some kind of order... our big project right now (aside from raising that little bugger named Mr. Bean) is the Home Theatre in our basement.

The basement itself is almost finished, with only carpeting left (we're waiting on this guy to come back from vacation). What we've got downstairs right now is this:

LG 47" LCD TV
Denon AVR-790 630W 7.1 receiver
Klipsch F1 Synergy 5.1 speakers+subwoofer
Xbox 360
Sony BDP-S550 Bluray player
VSonic all-region DVD player
Telus internet wireless router
Telus TV box
Acer Athlon 64 x2 desktop PC w/ Radeon HD 4870
Old Athlon desktop PC (for karaoke)
LG 19" LCD monitor (for karaoke)
Pair of Yorkville powered studio monitors (for karaoke)
Mackie ProFX8 mixer (ordered, on the way - for karaoke)

The plan is to hook everything (except karaoke components) up through the Denon receiver, which is of course outputting to the Klipsch speakers.

Xbox 360 -> Denon = HDMI
Bluray -> Denon = HDMI
Telus TV -> Denon = HDMI
Acer PC -> Denon = HDMI + 5.1 analog or Toslink
DVD -> Denon = Component
Denon -> TV = HDMI

For karaoke, we'll hook up the following:

Old PC -> TV = VGA
Old PC -> 19" monitor = DVI
Old PC -> ProFX8 = Mini stereo to L/R RCA
ProFX8 -> Studio monitors = 1/4"

That's about the gist.

The 47" TV will be wall-mounted (tiltable), with the center speaker sitting on a wall-shelf under the TV, and the subwoofer below that. The Yorkville studio monitors will sit on either side of the center speaker on the wall-shelf.

The 19" monitor will be wall-mounted (full-motion) around the top-right corner of the room and be tilted down and in. It's basically for picking songs for karaoke.

All other components will sit on a custom-made 48"x20"x18" shelf in the corner, with 5 compartments plus the top of the shelf.

I'm still undecided over the audio output from the Acer PC to the Denon receiver. I can choose between 5.1 analog out from the SoundBlaster card I rip out of the Old PC, or the Toslink from the onboard audio. I'm not sure if I can do both simultaneously. Toslink would allow me to play DVD's and such on the Acer PC, ensuring that the audio is decoded by the receiver.

But games won't output audio by Toslink. In which case, I could either use the 5.1 out from the onboard sound, or stick the SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS into the Acer PC. I'm still under the impression that the Audigy 2 ZS has internal Dolby Digital and DTS decoders... so I'm hoping for the best.