Archived News starting from 08-11-2008 and earlier
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Phase two of the bachelor party was a trip to
Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon. Our attempts to locate the
Allspark at the dam were unsuccessful, but we did manage to do some time travelling between Nevada and Arizona, despite the fact that most of Arizona doesn't observe daylight savings time. In addition to deflowering their Hoover dam and Grand Canyon virginity, we also made a stop at In and Out Burger which left
Lisa,
Stavos and Candy very sore from all the new experiences. The entire bachelor party agreed the grand canyon was too massive to fully comprehend, with our narrow eyes unable to process depth on such a scale. We took excessive photos anyways in a useless attempt to capture it.
A short break between bachelor party phases allowed for a
night in Vegas
where Lisa,
Stavos and Candy had their Vegas virgin deflowering. Lisa and I both won less than $20 which put us in the self-classified category of high rollers, and we spent accordingly. The
bachelor, meanwhile, went full saucer-eyes over the soon-to-be-closed
Star Trek Experience, which we then "experienced" as many times as we could before it closed for the night. A confusion over the words Plaza and Palazzo resulted in a failed rendezvous with the women, but deposited us in old Vegas for a proper evening wrapup.
Phase one of
Enoryms bachelor party was a
trip to Area 51 and a stay at the
Little A'Le'Inn. We took turns daring each other to cross the
restricted area signs while the guards in a white truck watched on with binoculars at the south entrance. We then went to check in before visiting the north gate. The Little A'Le'Inn turned out to be 3 mobile homes converted into a motel, which was exactly the kind of accommodations Lisa was hoping for. After she accepted her fate, we visited the north gate which actually had a physical gate and more of the same signs. That night we waited at the black (white) mailbox for aliens but only witnessed some open range cows and lots of bugs. The locals were a friendly bunch, getting us all drunk and not raping us. Definitely an experience to only be had once.
Granted it's not nearly as cool as
06-06-06 was, but today is yet another of the exciting triple same-digit date days lasting through 12-12-12 and not occuring again after till 01-01-3001. Since I plan on living that long, these next few years don't hold much significance to me, but those not blessed with the highlander disease might find these exciting times. Google says the image to the right is appropriate for today.
My RockBand fanboy rant at work resulted in enough interest to generate yet another 4 hour RockBand session. This time skilled players were involved, which resulted in Marco mastering the "expert" level brown notes on guitar, Brian surviving on "expert" drums with the support of his pregnant wife, and
EternalOne doing an extreme "easy" level bass. As usual, Lisa carried the band as lead singer. You can try to guess the other musician combos on
the video or just check out the
latest photos.
Not satisfied with my previous 4 hour RockBand binge, Lisa and I were joined by the Kelleys for
another 4 hour session. This time we had all 4 instruments going and confusion was at maximum. Enjoyment was also at maximum despite our inability to play anything harder than "easy." We recorded
Orange Crush,
Gonna Be My Girl,
Black Hole Sun, and
Blitzkrieg Bop for record label consideration.
After Lisa's mother told us we had to go outside on such a beautiful day, I decided it was time for our annual visit to
Kensington metro park. Since
Duane lives less than 5 minutes from the park, we decided to invite him to join us. He told us in no uncertain terms that he finds us distasteful and that we bear an unpleasant odor that he preferred not to endure. Undaunted, we continued to the park alone to enjoy a
rowing adventure with Lisa along with some shots of me stuffing food in my face and some
random photos from the future when we go to visit the Kelleys (who find our odor tolerable). An enjoyable day with some spacetime distortion to keep things interesting.
After learning the Guitar Hero guitars I already have work with Rock Band, and finding a
used drum set for $37, I was able to obtain the full Rock Band experience for under $60. With my neighbor on guitar, Lisa on vocals, and myself on drums we formed
We're Not Good which was our second choice after the first one was blocked for not enough o's. Our virtual band virtually rocked until we tried "Medium" difficulty which quickly put us back in our place. Our lead singer was picky about our songs, and the guitarist was overly excited about everything. It was just like a real band except it was in my basement and I have no musical skill other than hitting the right pad at the right time. The 3 hours of entertainment was more than worth the $60, and I've marked off yet another 6-month old fad on my list of things to catch up with.
After sacrificing as much time as 12 full days of my life to the
game, I finally got the top rank in Battlefield 2142 today, as thousands have before me. Much longer than the measly 46 hours
required for Call of Duty 4. I'm now free of computer games until
Starcraft 2 comes out sometime in the next year.
After passing on one too many motherboard deals,
this one finally got me to cave.
Duane and
Stavos had me converted to Intel architecture awhile back, but the quad cores are still too expensive, so I settled on a more affordable
Core 2 E7200 for now. The beauty of
this motherboard is that it accepts both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, so I was able to recycle the memory and every other component from my
old system to create the
new one for less than $200. The upgrade finally put me in the
10,000 3DMark club, and the onboard ICH9R RAID controller
boosted my I/O by at least 10MB/s across the board. Surprisingly my Vista rating remained the same, suggesting all the gains were due entirely to the faster front side bus. The upgrade also introduced me to the new
LGA 775 CPU interface which initially blew my mind. Instead of pins on the processor, there is a "Land Grid Array" of pins on the motherboard that match contacts on the CPU. Initially fearing homeland security would arrest me for using such fascist technology, I quickly remembered I had blown $200 on an unnecessary upgrade putting me back into the more accepted blind consumer category.
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