“Unfortunate” turn of events…

Friday night my son was playing the push the button fifty thousand times on my wife’s computer. We’ve been through enough home electronics because of this game I thought maybe in the interest of preserving her computer I should unplug her computer to keep it from blowing a cap or worse. So I unplugged it, we put the kid to bed later, she plugged it back in, and poof… 15 seconds of post and then nothingness.

First thought… the power supply. No big deal, I happen to have a spare (or three) lying around. I threw in the new one. Now the computer turns on, lights up, drives spin up… still no display, followed by the distinct smell of burning. WTF is going on here? Did we blow two power supplies in one night? Is that even possible? So I got out another spare and just hooked it up. Still no display. Atleast the burning smell was much less distinct. Now what?

So here I am on a Friday night, supposedly off from work and what I am doing? I’m tearing apart my wife’s computer and our “netflix computer” (a computer I built from spare parts that we had hooked up to the TV to watch online netflix movies on) to try and piece back together my wife’s computer in some sort of fashion resembling what had just died. Lucky for her, the netflix computer was a P4 2.6 GHz on a motherboard that still ran DDR 400 ram. So I was able to transplant that board and chip into her computer and get her up and running again. The downside to the situatioin is that the netflix computer was already wounded. It’s got several blow caps on the motherboard and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before it dies.

So now what do we do? Sure she’s up and running again but for how long? How am I going to fix it when that one dies as well? So many questions, so few answers. We all know it’s almost impossible to replace a socket 939 motherboard these days. You’re not going to find one new so used is your only option and if it’s working someone is probably using it. On top of that, I just got my summer bonus check from work. How nice is that?

So what does that all add up to? Am I buying her new parts? Of course not. It means finally… finally after giving up my tax refund to debt collectors and my tax rebate to our savings account, I finally get to spend some money on my computer in the name of giving her my old parts so she can have a stable computer again. I came up with the plan and it goes alittle something like this.

My work bonus was exactly $750. Most of it had to go into our savings. We are trying to get into a house sometime before my kid is an adult afterall. So $500 goes away, no touch. So that leaves me $250 to work with. $250 probably much better spent on other things but when I am used to spending well over $1000 a year on my computer, $250 is table scraps. Due to our financial situation this year, I’ll take anything I can get. Time for some budget upgrading.

After much ponderance at Newegg and Zipzoomfly, as well as pricewatch, here is what I ended up with;

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Socket AM2  - $81.99 Free Shipping

4GB (2X2GB Kit) of Corsair XMS2 PC6400 (DDR800) DDR2 Ram – $86.50 Free Shipping + $20 Mail in rebate

GIGABYTE GA-MA78G-DS3H Socket AM2+ with AMD’s 780G chipset – $97.58 shipped

All items were purchased from Newegg. Yeah, it’s a little over my budget but we could handle the difference. Here’s my thinking though. That ram is dirt cheap. When I get my rebate back it will have cost me $66 for 4GB. That’s insanely cheap. Even at $86 it’s still a great deal.

Next, the processor. I really wanted to go Phenom. I know, I know. I hear they suck against Intel’s Quadcore’s but hey, I’m a fanboy. Part of building a rig is putting a part of yourself in it. I want to be different than all the yahoo’s buying up the C2D’s and the C2Q’s and go with AMD to see for myself. Even if their Intel chips bench faster than my AMD chips, who cares all that much? My systems are usually rock solid stable and run the games plenty fast enough for me to enjoy.

So with that in mind, I couldn’t afford the Phenom I wanted. Not even the lowest priced one. Or even the X2 6400+ at 3.2GHz I was eyeballing. No, instead I found myself looking at the X2 6000 @ 3.0GHz. That should be a pretty solid jump from 2.2GHz right? Well they wanted $113 for that chip. And after looking around and pricing it all together with a decent motherboard plus my ram it was just too expensive. I needed to find a way to shave a few dollars off to make this possible for myself. What did I stumble across? The Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Box Edition. Only 2.6GHz but also only $81.99. Over $30 cheaper. Here’s the best part. It’s supposed to be an unlocked chip with easy overclockability up to and beyond 3.0GHz! I don’t usually overclock or condone it, but when it comes to unlocked multipliers, you don’t have to touch voltage or core speeds so it’s barely even overclocking. This is my chip and it’s just as good as that 6000+ if not better considering it has lower power requirements as well.

Finally, the hardest thing for me to dig up was a motherboard. I have a hard time following chipsets. I have some idea which of Intel chipsets are decent just from using them at work, but that’s for Intel Intel chipsets only. The highest end stuff we have at work is 965 chipset stuff. For AMD anything after NForce 4 is incredibly confusing to me. Nvidia’s Nforce used to be top notch for running AMD processors on but I’ve lost touch with their products post socket 939. I have heard however that AMD’s own 700 series chipets are pretty good. So the next step was figuring out which to get. Narrowing it down wasn’t too difficult. I quickly discovered that the 770 chipset doesn’t support Phenom’s. I really want to get a Phenom at some point down the road so that one’s out. That leaves me with 780 and 790 chipsets. Well anything with a 790 on it was either micro ATX or well out of my price range. That’s how I found my board. I’ve had some really good luck with Gigabyte boards (up until last Friday) so I’ve got nothing against them. The board has literally every feature I wanted including 6 SATA ports and 2 PCi-Express 2.0 ports for crossfire, another future upgrade I’m considering.

So all this for $266.07. I did it as far as I am concerned. I Stretched my dollar as far as it would go and put myself on the right path finally. I will be Phenom capable. I’ll already have more than enough Ram for anything. Finally, I’ll even be able to crossfire once when my video card gets down cheap enough that I want to pick up another one. Also, getting that 5000+ up to 3GHz if possible will be squeezing about as much speed as there is to squeeze out of a processor so I can’t complain about it not being fast enough. Now I’ll just need a couple more cores.

Microsoft visits Appleton, WI

 

So I was driving to a customer’s today and what do I discover in their neighbors parkinglot. Why it’s a giant truck that has “Microsoft” plastered all over it. How cool is that? It just so happens to be a lighter day for me at work so I figured what the hell. It’s my lunch break right?

So Microsoft drove one of their big old showcase trucks to Appleton, WI for an event sponsered by a CPA firm that happened to be next door to one of my dental office’s. I asked the office manager at the dental office if she knew what was going on over there.

“Oh yeah” she says. “They are doing some kind of promotion and we were invited by the accountants over there to attend. You can go if you want. Just tell them you’re with us.”

So I figured what the hell. My company afterall is a Microsoft OEM partner. I’m also a borderline IT professional. Maybe not in the traditional sense, by my customers do come to me for a lot of their IT needs. Especially those requiring software. So I decided, I was going back there for my lunch break and I was going to get to the bottom of what they were showing off. I was also hoping to score some swag along the way. I love swag.

So I when I finally showed up I decided the worst they could do was tell me no so I just parked in their parkinglot and hopped out of my van. I stated that I was a computer technician with whom many IT decisions are depended on. I filled out a questionare/raffle ticket and crossed my fingers to win that free Microsoft Zune or even better, a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. Finally, I entered the van.

Now I’ve been in a showcase van approximately once before. For my last job when we were entertaining IP telephony proposals Sisco showed up with their own high tech big rig. Now that thing was cool. Not just a bunch of talk, but actual working IP telephony demonstrations and equipment. They even offered us beer. No one accepted of course being on the job and all, but it was a nice offer.

The Microsoft van was not quite as a techie wet dream as I had hoped. No, it was more of a mobile showroom for HP computers and cellphones that ran Microsoft’s Mobile OS. It had more of a look but don’t touch sort of feel to it and there weren’t really any product demonstrations going on with one exception. Windows Vista.

When you walk up the steps into this particular van you are greeted by a 50″ (approximately… I didn’t exactly whip out the tape measure) plasma screen TV that is mounted on the far wall. Upon this monitor is displayed the presenters very cleverly crafted moving desktop (a waterfall) and all of his handy lil Microsoft Gadgets strewn about the right hand side of his screen. Not that impressive at all. I’ve seen similar displays at Best Buy. Not to mention on his screen the man had up several system monitoring gadgets displaying hard drive usage as well as memory monitor utilities. Perhaps I would’ve hidden that one. The reason is this. Idling at his desktop with his gadgets and moving screen saver, the man’s poor computer was actively using 1.8GB’s of ram. IDLE! I’ve heard the resource hog stories but that seemed extreme. To make a comparison, with Windows XP Professional x64, I am currently sitting at 29% usage. I have two internet explorer 7 windows open, I am running two IM clients, and I have a total of 55 processes running. I have 3GB of ram total, making me use a whopping 1GB of ram for all these applications. My system is not idle.

The reason I bring that up is because that worries me. Most of the business world out there is running on computers with 1GB or less of memory. After June 30th, unless you are an OEM partner you will no longer be able to buy Windows XP. After January 1st of 2009, not even OEM partners will be able to buy it. Sure support, as I was reassured, will go on until 2014 but what about companies with large Windows XP infrastructures based on computers with 1GB or less. Vista will run on these computers I was told. But will it preform all of the neat tricks and jump through all the hopes he showed us? Without major computer overhauling I highly doubt it. The workstation computer is about to get a whole lot beefer.

Not to rag on Microsoft too much. 6 years was a long time to go without a new product. To be honest I was shown some very impressive new features in Vista that I would love to call my own. Gadgets don’t impress me. I was playing around with Yahoo Widgets since they came out in Beta and I’ve never been that fond of them. However the new search capabilties really rocked my world. Not too mention the moving background has some potential, even in the business world. Especially in the small business world where computers may be visible by customers.

The coolest thing I saw during the demo was the ability of Windows Vista to edit Meta data in a file on the fly. You can search for files the traditional way, or you can tag them in their meta data and reference them a whole new way. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Want a bunch of vacation pictures to magically appear when you type in Mexico into your Vista search box? Select all of those pictures and put Mexico in their “tag” field. Easy, done, now you don’t have to remember where you actually put them or what their file names are. Digital camera’s certainly don’t make it very easy to organize pictures when you have to name each one individually right away or else have to sift through hundreds of pictures with a seemingly useless numbering system. I also feel this meta data tagging could be extremely useful for offices where groups of specific people share specific documents that happened to be scattered about the server in seemingly random locations. Work in accounting? Need an accounting form. Don’t want to dig through HR’s forms and IT’s forms to get the one you need? Tag it… search for accounting… there it is. Lovely.

I have to say for the limited amount of swag I recieved, none of it Microsoft branded I might add, I did feel sort of patronized. I realize I wasn’t really the intended audience… well maybe I was, I’m not sure I never found the actual event listing to see. However the overall point of the presentation was this; Vista is better. Here is their logic to this.

1. XP released equally unstable and with 60-70% more out of the box vulerabilities.

2. Vista has 50% less vulnerabilities than Mac OS X (any version)

3. Vista is more secure

4. Vista is more secure (yes, I get it)

5. Vista doesn’t let anything happen to your system files without you knowing about it

5.1. Vista is more secure (stop already)

6. It’s not Vista’s fault, it’s everybody elses for not writing good enough drivers or software

7. I’ve never paid attention to what a resource hog this OS really is because they gave me a really beefy laptop to present it on (terribly paraphrased obviously. I was told that he hadn’t been paying attention to his memory usage. WTF are you running a memory monitor gadget for then!?)

8. Vista works really well with Office 2007 (This I can attest too. I saw some really cool integration between the two.)

9. Vista’s enhanced securtiy can be turned off with the click of a mouse

10. Vista is more secure… period

 

So there you have it folks. I have to add the built in previewing system that allows you to see your documents before you open them was pretty cool but it only works if you have Office 2007 and you’re files saved in the new Word, Excel, or Powerpoint formats. I’m not sure how backwards compatibility plays with those formats but older office formats did not allow for previewing. I’ve always thought Vista’s Aero window switching was a neat feature that allows you to seemlessly transfer back and forth to the correct documents was cool, but what they don’t tell you is that that feature is only availible in certain versions as long as you have a powerful enough video card to handle Vista’s 3D features.

The bottom line appears to be this. Vista is more secure. Just kidding… well not really. Vista is coming. It’s already here and has been but now it’s about to become the only option. We’d all better just learn how to use it and learn to enjoy it. I hope someday since apparently I didn’t win anything in their raffle, I will be able to afford the $400 to drop on Vista Ultimate so that I can live it, learn it, love it (my own slogan) but until then I will be perfectly happy with my Windows XP Professional.  

The Pan Man

 

Recently at work I’ve coined a new nickname for myself. I know typically one doesn’t create their own nicknames but I’ve earned this one. I have deemed myself The Pan Man. No it has nothing to do with any kind of culinary prowless.

No, it has to do with Panoramic X-rays or as we in the service world call them, pans. I consider it one of the coolest things I get to do at work. At least I think it is cool. My wife gets bored to tears when I tell her about my experiences with this stuff.

My company sells many different makes and models of pans but we primarily focus on three different manufacturers. They are Planmeca, Sirona, and Schick Technologies. All of these companies manufacture many other items found in a dental office but they all seem to have a special focus and generally high quality standard when it comes to digital radiography. I am going to go a little into detailed on a handful of the products that these companies produce and talk a bit about what it is I get to do with these things.

First of all, what is a Panoramic x-ray. Well Pans are those hulking x-ray machines that lot of dentists out there have for taking x-rays of your entire mouth. It allows them to see all of your teeth in one picture as well as see problems you may have with your jaw or even your sinuses. They can also allow the doctor to take precise measurements of spaces between teeth and of gum tissue for placement of implants and crowns. The main reason why only some offices have them is the huge financial cost these machines have up front. For example, a digital pan can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000. That can be a huge determining factor when it comes to deciding whether or not an office’s needs can be met with or without one.

For more information on Panoramic x-rays and how they work, check out this brief Wiki listing.

 

 I am actually a certified by Planmeca to work on their digital x-ray equipment. That means I went to their USA headquarters and took part in a two day class where we dissected one of their machines and went over their software in detail. I was even tested and passed with a rather high score. I have a certificate that I keep on a shelf above my desk. It is sort of a thing of pride for me.

Planmeca sells several different models of Digital Pans. I prefer only two of them. They are their Proline XC model and their Promax line. The primary reasons I prefer these models is because I’ve seen the image quality to be simply fantastic and these machines can be very pleasant to work on. They are also engineered beautifully to not only function extremely well but also to be attractive as they are usually mounted in very open and public hallways or corners of a dental office. It helps to sell when not only is it going to function well, but also not stand out as a hulking ugly machine. Below is a picture of a Promax model. Also note the picture heading this article is a sample taken with a Promax.

 

 

So what do I get to do with these awesome machines? I get to do quite a bit with them actually. They can weigh from 300lbs to 600lbs so I prefer not to be there when they are being physically installed but I don’t mind helping out if it is necessary. I am just a little guy after all and me being on the heavy end of one of these beasts usually isn’t good for anyone involved.

However after they are physically installed there are several steps that must be taken to ensure the machine will work when the doctor puts his or her first patient in it. Nobody likes to irradiate a patient unnecessarily so it is crucial to make sure the Pan is working and that the image quality is within proper tolerances. This includes connecting the Pan to either a network as a network node as all Planmeca digital models can be either out of box or with an addition device known as a network interface box or directly to a computer usually through a USB cable or in some cases a proprietary PCI card with the necessary interface port. 

Once physically attached, the pan then must be configured to either sit on the network as a node and/or to the computer via software drivers. Once connected to the computer these machines essecentially act as large scanners interfaced with either a direct interface driver or a twain driver. The twain drivers can be much nicer to work with as the manufacturers usually include a very nice and simple to use software interface for their own machines. For the Planmeca Pans, a twain driver is almost a must have, even with our own imaging software.

Next the Pan must be calibrated. Most of the time this means creating color calibration files that gives the software a baseline for what the color/contrast of the images should be as it acquires them. Most Pans will not let you activate them without a calibration file. These are often included with the Pan via CD or flash drive. Sometimes they must be made using included Pan calibration software. The process for this can vary. One of the reasons I like the Planmeca Pans is because creating calibration files for them is a very easy process that doesn’t require much grunt work. 

If for some reason the physical components of the pan are not aligned properly, they too must be re-calibrated before the calibration files can be created. This process also varies greatly from model to model. I just spent three hours earlier this week recalibrating the secondary collimator on the cephlometric side of a Promax Pan. This required the fine tuning of several bolts and set screws to adjust a physical slot that the beam shoots through mere millimeters. If anything is off by more than a 2mm variance on a Planmeca Pan you will not get good quality images.

Once the pan is calibrated and the calibration files created or installed, all that is left to do is to interface the pan with whatever software is being used to take the images. Usually this is the easiest step of them all and is the matter of selecting it in a preference window or box somewhere in the software. Once done the begins in the way of taking a test image to see if the job is done. This can be the harrowing part because if a test image is not of high quality, it can be necessary to take the pan apart cover by cover and start the fine tuning process over. This can take hours, especially if you are not familiar with that model.

It is also possible to convert most traditional film based Pans to digital through a couple of different methods. The first is by replacing film with phosphor plates which are the same size as film but can be read by a specially designed scanner that can take the image from the plate and transfer it to a digital image. If an office is already using a phosphor plate scanner for their inter-oral x-rays (smaller x-rays that they take while you are sitting in their chair) buying a plate for their film pan can be a very inexpensive way to get digital pans. The downside to this method is that phosphor plates do have a lifespan of only about a year and do require being replaced periodically.

The other method is for an office to buy a retro conversion kit. This is basically a digital sensor and interface box that is specially designed for their model of film based pan. You mount this sensor into their film cassette and run the cord around the pan and in the end plug it into their computer. Now they have a permenant digital pan for much less then the price of buying a digital pan outright. This can be a wonderful option for an office that payed tens of thousands of dollars for a film based pan in the last several years and need that investment to last while still being able to offer their patients the benefit of digital radiography.

I absolutely despise working on these retro kits. The concept is great however they need to come a long way to be entirely practical. They require very precise installations and can be knocked out of place very easily. Plus they vary so much to accommodate the various pan models that if you do one, you aren’t necessarily going to have a good time with another. I’ve had one that went in flawlessly in about 45 minutes and everyone since then has taken hours plus return trips for adjustments. Their mounting brackets just aren’t very well designed for the degree of precision that they must be installed with. The only brand I have worked with as they are the only brand that we sell is the Schick Technologies iPan. However despite it’s drawbacks for installation, I must say once one is up and working, it does take a nice image and as long as it isn’t tweaked and messed up, they can last for years and years taking nice images the whole time.

In summation, I feel that everyone should have a niche in their job. Something to make them that much more important to the company. I feel that mine is Digital Radiography, especially digital pans. With some recent restructuring, my company is putting the utmost importantance on expanding our market into digital radiography and digtal equipment sales so learning this stuff inside and out is not only a fun ride for me, but also increases my value to my company and my customers. What’s more important than that?

Most important is that I do enjoy it. I mean who else gets to work on this kind of stuff? While you’ll probably never think about it at the time, but if you step into a digital panoramic x-ray machine anywhere in North Central, to Northeast Wisconsin or the the Western half of the UP, there is a good chance that I’ve had my hands on it at some point or another. The next time your dentist shows you a picture of the bones and teeth inside your mouth, think about who made that possible. Who made all that equipment come together to work to produce and transfer that image so it could be shown to you. If it was in Northern Wisconsin or the Western UP of Michigan, it was probably me.

Rocking Out!

So my parents came out here to visit us during the week of Memorial Day this year. My birthday happens to be May 29th. That means some years it is on Memorial Day. This year it was not but it did occur during the week that my parents were here.

For my birthday this year, aside from taking my wife and I out to dinner, my parents took me to Best Buy and allowed me to pick out my own present. Talk about tough decisions. The process was actually completely miserable for me. How do you pick out only one thing at Best Buy? It was like nearly impossible for me to decide. I dragged my wife around the entire store and literally looked at everything. Obviously my parents aren’t rich so the price limit on my gift was reasonable, but harder yet it wasn’t a set limit. After an hour of picking through the entire store and eyeballing several reasonable things, I finally landed in the Wii section.

By this time my wife and I were starving. It was 7:30pm and neither of us had eatten lunch or much of anything that day. We were expecting this to be a quick trip and to head straight out to our selected restuarant. Finally, with a wife about to kill me, a rumbling and painfully empty stomach, I settled on Guitar Hero 3. I know what your thinking. Finally. No I didn’t already have it yet. $90 is a lot for me to spend on one Wii game out of my own budget. As a gift it was definately looking a lot more reasonable.

So to bring a getting very long story to a quicker ending, I’ll just menion that I’ve played Guitar Hero 2 at a friends house on a PS2 only once before. It was a lot of fun. Little did I realize just how much fun it could be the second, third, fourth, etc time on. That game has gotten a lot of play around here. My wife was the first to finish it on easy mode. But only because I did the last guitar battle for her when she paused it to answer the phone. I finished it shortly thereafter but I set for myself a much more complicated goal of achieving 5 stars in every single song on easy before I move on to medium. I’ve actually gotten pretty decent at it in easy mode. I am only two songs short of my goal.

Overall I give this game a 10. 10 what? I don’t know. I don’t really have a numbered rating system. The only thing I can really say about it is that I made the right choice. A birthday present is supposed to be something special that you enjoy. Well that can surely be said about Guitar Hero 3. Any game that gets my wife to play the Wii is definately a winner. Also it’s just highly addictive to sit there through some of your favorite classic songs and feel like you are a part of them. Also it’s a lot of fun to get exposure to a lot of songs that maybe you’ve never heard before. They are all classics by their own rights, some newer than others.

Bottom line, if you like listening to music this game is for you. If you like feeling like a part of the game physically, this game is for you. For absolute beginners, don’t expect to finish your first few songs. It takes a bit of getting used to. Once you are used to it you will strive to get better. That’s what makes this game so strong. With plenty upon plenty of unlockables you have plenty of motivation to play every single song as well as advance through the different difficulty levels so that you can earn more money and either unlock items by purchasing them or by discovering them.

My opinion is that everyone with a Wii should have this game. Just beware. I have lost two entire weekends to this game. Well, not quite that bad, you can pause it and come back to it just as easily as any other game out there. So definately, if you haven’t picked it up yet, stop by the demo station at just about any store that sells video games and pick up that guitar. It doesn’t matter which system you demo it on cause the controls are all the same for either of the consoles though the Wii version incorporates motion for activating your star power. Once again, a definate must have title. Just make sure you have plenty of time to play and rest your fingers often. They will get fatigued.

 

 

Wii can all be Fit!

 

I am really digging Wii Fit. My parents got it for us last week for our anniversary. Well it was supposed to be my birthday present but somehow my mom decided that it should be our anniversary present instead. That’s how I scored Guitar Hero III for my birthday.

Anyway, if you have a Wii you should really consider Wii Fit. If you thought the Wii kept you active before, wait till it’s actually trying. The best part is, it’s actually fun! Nobody likes exercising by itself. Well I suppose some of you might… weirdos… Just kidding.

This game, and it is still a game, holds your hand and guides you to setting and meeting a weight/BMI (Body Mass Index) goal. It’s measures your BMI, and your balance and coordination and recommends which of it’s activities would best help you achieve your goals. It comes with Aerobic, Strength, Yoga, and Balance activities that help you improve your fitness. Someone like me who is a bean pole with huge feet, I really need a lot of help with my balance so that’s where I spent most of my time.

So when it comes to setting goals, most of you that know me or that have looked at my pictures, know that I am a bean pole. Tall and skinny. What weight goal could I possibly have? I set mine to have me gain ten pounds. I’m hoping that those ten pounds can be muscle. I think that would fill me out rather nicely and the game helps me keep track of it as often as I turn it on. Ideally the game wants you to play for 30 minutes everyday. Entertainment wise I could do it, but lets face it, we’re not all up for exercise everyday. Especially lately since I’ve been sick. But I have been trying to tough it out as often as possible. Not that’s it’s all that tough.

So the Balance Board adds a new dimension to “playing”. Now you get to add your feet into the mix. It definately takes a day or two to get the hang of and really start racking up the high scores. Did I mention the game gives you scores for all of your activities? It’s been great! My wife and I compete to be the best at all of the activities. It’s motivation for us to play as well as to really try. Another aspect that makes it all the more interesting and worthwhile. It’s great to do it together or just challenge yourself and try for that better score each time.

So all in all the only thing I wish is that the balance board was alittle deeper. My size 12, sometimes 12.5 depending on the shoemaker, feet just barely fit on the board and at times with the stepping on and off I miss or catch the ball of my foot on the edge of it. Damn those tiny footed Japanese. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to become more accurate. That’s the whole point afterall isn’t it?

I think once you see it this will all make sense. I showed it to my parents for approximately 20 minutes and then let my dad try out the first body test and a couple balance games. They were looking for one the next day at Best Buy. Too bad they were sold out. They’ll find one once they get home. Well… That’s my rave.