Ah, back from a weeklong trip at Walt Disney World.  A very nice vacation with the family, if not all that relaxing... MGM was probably our favorite place to visit, and acquiring action figures from the various stores was the main pursuit of the boys.  In the future maybe I'll get more rollercoaster riding in...

One nice surprise was on Wednesday being called and told that my PS3 preorder was available!  So this morning I zipped over to Gamestop and grabbed it, along with Resistance and Genji.  They were out of HDMI cables, which turned out to be a blessing -- the official Sony HDMI cables are quite a ripoff!  The exact same cable that they charge $60 for can be fairly easily found for $20.  It's digital, so there's no issues with the quality of the signal.  In fact, when I went to Fry's literally the same piece of hardware was $60 in the HDTV aisle and $20 in the computer cables aisle.  Crazy.

I'm saving Resistance for tonight after the boys go to sleep but my initial impressions of the PS3 are generally favorable... it's a huge piece of hardware but very quiet, and physically quite nice (if somewhat large).  Setting it up was pretty easy once I had the right cables, though I couldn't get it to navigate my wireless security at all.  In general it's a less polished experience than the Xbox 360 dashboard or Xbox Live, and it's full of little bugs like having to power down after playing a Blu-ray movie to get sound in a game.

I can't say it's worth the huge tent city feeding frenzy back on launch day though.  Judging from eBay most of those were speculators anyways, who are rapidly finding that their visions of $2500 auctions and easy money are not very realistic.  $1000 sales seem much more the norm, and hey a few hundred bucks of profit is OK I guess but doesn't seem worth days of camping out...