Archived News starting from 03-02-2011 and earlier
BlogAfter reading all about how the avatar project was an
overpriced waste of time on the Major Nelson blog, I noticed his gamertag had an "Xbox Dashboard" game icon. I can even
compare my gamerscore with him on it (but strangely enough I can't view the actual title). I remember once reading an article that I can't find speculating MS was thinking about making achievements like "watched 100 DVDs" and other non-gaming activities. Is this a sign of the spring update including these? Will I be forced to swap 100 DVD movies to get my cheevo fix now? I can only hope for an "Old School" cheevo that requires playing an HD DVD movie. Otherwise I have no justification for continuing to hold on to the outdated format drive.

Autorama held an unexpected surprise for me this year, an imported 2009 Focus RS.
After strolling through the show, then stopping by to say hello to a friend who had his car entered,
a glint of spearmint green caught my eye. Curious what car had such a fugly color, I made my way towards it
and there, hidden away in the corner of the show was my unobtainable (in the US) dream car.
The people running the booth must have thought I was joking when I started telling them all the nasty
things I wanted to do to the car, as they laughed and let me have my way with it. I had full run of the
car save the engine compartment which I was told Ford would not allow to be opened despite my $100 bill waving in
their face. After caressing every inch of accessable space, I waited for a promised "Ford man" to show up
after the show ended, but he never did and my dream of a connected battery went unfulfilled.

With the (unwilling) liberation of Lila from her mother, our life-long torture begins with playing hot potato.
The
Senator and
Candy
were first up, followed quickly by
Lauren and
Robbie.
Erin and the
Morlock brought food, starting a trend that continued with
James and
Cailen while
John just ate food (Lila tried to nurse it back from him).
Finally
Myrn and
Keith both had a chance
to retroactively hold her. I anticipate a healthy immune system in her future.

It began with Lisa giving me a look of fear, to which I made a snide remark and was informed it was time to get ready for our movie, and that her water may have broken. Having successfully confused me with her order of operations, we drove to see “Gnomeo and Juliet” and got about halfway through before I was informed it was time to go to the hospital. Still in logic overload, I began processing the fact I may soon be a father. Random thoughts started pouring out of my mouth to which Lisa just laughed and calmly told me I was losing my mind. Upon arrival, we were greeted with skepticism being 4 weeks early, so a sample was taken and analyzed at which point I was told we were going home parents. I could hardly keep up with the acronyms and terminology that began flowing out of Lisa and the entire labor and delivery unit who swarmed her room like protective worker bees around their hive. I wisely stood back and did as I was told, helping her walk and rubbing her back as she used various methods to help stimulate contractions naturally. After almost 22 hours of little progress, she finally agreed to oxytocin and immediately started feeling a difference. Fighting the first few urges, she remembered to relax and found them much easier. I tried to look relevant by brushing her hair and telling her to breathe, which worked well until active labor started and I was told to shut up. I then resigned myself to providing water and a cold compress when requested as her co-workers shifted into high gear and talked her through the delivery. Once the baby was poking its head out, it took almost 15 contractions (30 mins) for the final push completely draining Lisa of all energy. Seeing an opportunity to be useful, I followed my new daughter to the warmer where she was toweled off and put under a heating lamp while Lisa was being repaired. The moment she grabbed my finger with her tiny hand I was in love, and refused to leave her side as they moved her into the special care section to get all of the fluid out of her on account of the pre-term condition she was in. With a tight grip on my finger, I watched her fight out the fluid and begin breathing regularly, and smile (probably from gas). Finally my father arrived and only after he swore on his life to never leave her side did I check up on Lisa and discover her taking a well-deserved nap. A stream of visitors including both sets of parents then descended upon the new baby to make her regret ever leaving the safety of Lisa.

After recovering from the death flu, my vehicle abuse urge was becoming unbearable. I quenched the desire with some
snowtastic donuts in a nearby abandoned parking lot. You'll noticed some unrelated photos before the mother load on account of being too lazy to separate them, they are equally enjoyable to caption. Payback was swift, in the form of
home defilement courtesy of Lisa who uses the superbowl as an excuse to beat and demasculate me by reminding me how much of a girl I am for not watching men toss a ball around in tight pants. I took my punishment and shoved mini bbq weiners in my mouth to try and show her I wasn't gay.
It snowed a lot, and I got the flu. Snowpocolypse. You can watch me
plow out right before my body wretched out every body fluid it could simultaneously. Ugh.
The 3 people who read this blog may notice my recent trumpeting about an upgrade to Server 2008 no longer exists. Censored you ask? Never. A glitch in Access you ask? No, I moved on to SQL 2K8 a while ago, but the Access jokes need not stop. It was, in fact, a stubborn OCX file. Everything was going according to plan until my
FreeWx weather software (which you can see is now a squatter site) stated "xTFTP.OCX not registered properly." Google searches yielded only more squatter and phishing sites, but
EternalOne mentioned
dependency walker which will be the only useful bit of information you might gain from this. After replacing and registering 5 conflicting dependent OCX and DLL files even the mighty dependency walker was stumped. Without a way to share weather data with the world, I'm stuck in 2003 for the foreseeable future.

The
2011 Jan LAN was a BFBC2 exclusive, and surprisingly the 8 participants had no lag issues despite the lack of a local game server. The addition of now famous "Robbie the neighbor" set the tone for excessive shenanigans and by the end of the night my lungs hurt from laughing so much.
Tigerbomb consumed excessive amounts of bourbon and performed various russian and italian comedy routines which brought me that much closer to an aneurism. TomTom spiked some baby bottles from the
baby shower and contributed inappropriate poses throughout the evening. The
Senator, James, and Jeffords being the only sober players dominated the games. While missing several key veteran LAN attendees, Robbie, Ryan and James took up the slack and survived their first LAN party. Only time will tell if the Senators prediction that this is the last LAN party comes true.
Webcam and
timelapse to excite your loins.

Having missed the annual pilgramiage to NAIAS last year due to
Lisas illness, I was determined to
attend this year. Of particular importance was the presence of the Ford Focus ST, my next vehicle purchase and object of masturbation until it's (and my) release next year. The senator was very accommodating, allowing me to pine over my dream car unhindered for almost an hour before I decided I could take a 30 minute break to see the rest of the show. After harassing some models (of the vehicular and female variety) we made our way downstairs and experienced our first ride in a Chevy Volt. The Senator fired 3.0Ghz questions at our 733Mhz driver resulting in a hard lock that left us without any answers, but a better understanding of silent transportation. Realizing my shakes were coming back, I returned to the Focus ST for another fix. This time a metro looking young man offered to take interior photos for me, but refused to let me sit inside despite a tempting offer of a blow job. Having exhausted all means of making physical contact with the car, I left defeated, but hopeful.
Now that I once again have
all achievements in BFBC2 (thanks to the piloting skills of
Stavos) I can safely try the PC version of the game. It's immediately clear that a new Xbox console is overdue, as the graphics cranked to full on a 1680x1050 monitor blew me away. At one point I just walked around a chopper looking at all the detail. After some fiddling with toggle vs hold on the zoom and crouch controls it wasn't that hard of a switch either, as is evidenced by my
complete domination of my first round. Everything did seem slower though, PC running feels like console walking but I'm not sure if that's real or imagined. Nevertheless, until another achievement-laden expansion arrives for the game I'm available on both platforms for war orgy.
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