Archived News starting from 10-31-2009 and earlier
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With
Senator Kelleys house cleaned for showings, his annual event was transferred to the same bowling alley
Enorym had his
birthday party 6 years ago. While Enorym has since moved on to California, Whiney Ho and Schwartz returned, along with
Tigerbomb, Gina,
Morlock and Arizona. A generous helping of $1.75 games and $2 beer contributed to the perfect mix of intoxication and shenanigans that carried over into the after party. Fun was mandated and confirmed to have occured for everyone involved, despite a showing of
the crappiest Halloween movie ever. Thanks to the Senator and Lisa for all the planning, and to everyone else who showed up and prevented me from spending Halloween on my Xbox.
Thanks to
Forza 3, I finally own a Focus RS
of my very own. While it's only a virtual version, it helps fill the hole created by the announcement it will not be arriving in North America in the real world. Camping trips, picnics, and long relaxing drives are all planned around the tracks in the game using my unequalled imagination. I've even set aside some time for Lisa to tell me I'm driving too fast and have some syrup of ipecac to simulate her motion sickness.
NFS: SHIFT had a nice Focus ST but without the bigger engine and
revoknuckle it just wasn't the same. Yet another reason to never leave my basement has arrived.
While much of the hype around
Google Wave has died down, I was still tickled pink to find an invite in my email this morning.
Enorym made good on his promise to send an invite to
the beardless Senator and I; and now we're riding the nerd wave of exclusive preview. So far it's just a glorified chat window as we're still ignorant of all the features, but the wow factor of seeing text appear as it's typed made a big impact. Almost like 1997 when normal BBS chat occurred real time, and like 1997 you can still out-type the transport method as it tries to "sync" the wave from time to time (bursts of text). Make no mistake I'm still happy with my golden ticket, just got too hyped up ahead of time.
During a heated (and lengthy) game of co-op
Borderlands I was presented with a "you've been disconnected from Xbox Live" message. On reconnecting, a dashboard update that could only be the
preview program downloaded and installed. After rebooting, I tried out the facebook and twitter apps only to be mildy disappointed by their simplicity. Almost half the facebook status posts contained web links or videos which were not accessable on account of no browser included on the Xbox (you win this one, PS3). Twitter was equally simple but there's less to miss with the service. Last.fm was almost identical to their web interface, but since I can't play it while doing other things I'm sure it's use will be rare. Overall some neat additions but hoping they update each with additional features in the near future. My need to kill scrags approaching a critical level, I re-joined the game I got booted from and savored the sweet release of scrag death.
With my
home server running 24/7 except for vacations, it felt like a waste for the 80% of the week I wasn't using it. As a die hard hippie, it was with great sadness I finally accepted all things home server revolved around constant uptime. Well that sadness is finally over after I discovered the
lights out add-on. Now it only runs when I need it, saving power as well as wear and tear on the system (only cycles 4 times a month). If you stumble across this and actually HAVE a home server, you'll need to disable the SBCore service first, and the easiest way I found to do that is
here.
After 2 years of asking for a subwoofer install, the cosmos finally aligned during a pumpkin smashing trial at the
Morlocks and put Jeffords in close enough proximity to my barn during a warm enough day to
activate the event. Although a full hour over my initial estimate, the Jeffords is now fully bass enabled, at least to the limit of his 150 watt subwoofer. Thanks to the Morlock and Canada who both lent a hand during the ordeal. Despite the lack of a dedicated subwoofer output on the radio head unit, it was a relatively straight forward procedure and the result is clearly the work of professionals.
After cheering my sister on in her
26.5 mile marathon I strolled through
Fort and Griswold and stumbled upon
this puzzling scene. Knowing there was no real police station in the area I immediately concluded it was a set for a movie. After asking a construction worker at the site he confirmed it's a set for the new
Red Dawn with Chinese and Russians in the new version (instead of Cubans and Russians). The set looked awesome, and I'm proud to say
my tax money helped pay for production. I just better get a free ticket out of it.
A week vacation gave my co-workers plenty of time to desecrate my cube, but I never expected it to reach the degree that
greeted me on my return. From pink purses to a pink poster board castle border, there was clearly over an hour of time invested in it. Respectful of the art, I continue to work at the desk as-is until it falls down on it's own.
Last week Lisa lost her cruise ship virginity on
Carnival Victory during the 2nd anniversary of our legally binding contract. The week long cruise included
St. Thomas,
Dominica,
Barbados,
St. Lucia,
Antigua and
St. Kitts. It was a magical mystery cruise of waterfalls, rain forests, beaches and monkeys; stuffing my face with food the entire time. Even though it wasn't a Disney cruise, we
spotted Wall-E loading shipping containers in Barbados and a
tree monster in Dominica. We also
met Chris Rock and
Kanye West while at the beach. Who knew celebrities were so accessible in the Caribbean. Our return trip was far more exciting than the cruise as a mad dash to the airport resulted in missing our flight by one minute and resulted in a $800 return flight that I thoroughly enjoyed paying.
After shipping a refurb Xbox 360 to
Enorym, along with a follow up care package of my old HDD, HD cables and
Stavos' old DiRT game I was finally able to add
Mnstrtq as an Xbox friend. Words cannot describe the elation I experienced finally having a virtual representative of the friend who left me
over 6 years ago back in my living room. His conclusion that the Xbox was a gift is amusing, and he seems to genuinely believe it. Clearly the subliminal programming from Microsoft was the real cause, and I've simply spread the disease like a virus to his house. Just another minion in the growing Xbox LIVE zombie army Microsoft is breeding for world domination.
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