Burn baby burn

So. I broke down and threw together a cd of Graeme. I leave it to my wife to send off or not. While it's certainly an amusing little movie, I'm not certain I have any real desire to see Graeme on national TV. It's more fun to leave it a pipe dream.

Anyway, the week is half over. This weekend will involve some serious shopping. I think it's finally time we get ourselves a new stove. I've pretty much had it with the one we've got. One burner only works when it's in the mood and a couple of the other burners are obviously thinking of following suit. It's pretty frustrating.

It's-a Monday

So, first things first, I totally rocked my way through Hard mode in Guitar Hero. Bark at the Moon? Oh yeah. And by rocked, I mean scraped through by the skin of my teeth. Let's just say that power bar you can build up comes in handy. I have managed to make it through the first ten songs on Expert though, so my shattered ego was placated a little.

Rumor has it that Coinstar machines are going to start spitting out e-credits for the iTunes music store. Loose change is no longer safe... Perfect Situations by Weezer and 99 Red Balloons by Goldfinger will be mine. I don't care how many couches I need to raid...

And the lawn mowing is imminent. I broke down and changed the oil this afternoon in that treacherous beast that is my lawn mower. I proceeded to start it up on the first pull. An ominous sign. It's taunting me. I can tell. The back yard at least looks presentable again. Fortunately the front really didn't need to be mowed.

Apparently America's Funniest Videos does take digital files. I still have the movie of Graeme dancing around on the desktop. I may have to burn it to cd and send it in.

And in fluff related news, I scored an Exceeds Expectations on the level 1 W.O.M.B.A.T.s over at Rowling's Harry Potter site. Ha! Err, I mean, not that I care or anything.

Dancin' Fool

Graeme loves music. And loves to dance to it. We managed to get some video footage of him dancing around and it is quite awesome. If I had a way of posting it for you guys to see, I'd contemplate trying. Instead you'll just have to live with the partial knowledge that he's quite the dancer.

Which offers a bit of a segue into how nice iMovie is. I think the whole process of getting a few movie clips with the camera and then getting them onto the computer and turning it into a short movie with a couple titles took all of 10 minutes. Maybe. I love the Mac...

My wife is off torturing the kids by taking them to see the Easter Bunny. I expect shots of Graeme crying and the girls standing there looking bored. But I could be wrong.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

Oh, Guitar Hero update. I only have Bark at the Moon left on Hard. Some day I'll make it through!

Technology

So we're going to join this technological age of ours by using the computer to take care of a few things. Such fun.

The weather can't make up its mind as to whether it should be raining or snowing. So it's (of course) doing both. Such lovely weather. And on top of that it's playing hell with my sinuses. Stupid rapid temperature changes.

The letter 'r' is off to see the cherry blossoms in D.C. That would be fun. Hopefully there will be some nice pictures at the end. I told him to try some Sakura Mochi. We'll see if he's brave enough.

Is it the weekend yet?

Long day

Carpooling can be quite nice, but when your carpool partner has to stick around for a while, it can be pretty maddening as well. Managed to snag the fancy 2 disc Narnia set. It's a little disturbing that stores are starting to charge a bit more for those sets that initial week. Used to be you could pick them up pretty cheap. Maybe a touch more than the plain vanilla release (assuming one came out at the same time) but not as bad as about twice that price. Of course, I'm a sucker for the special edition so there wasn't really a question around whether I'd pick it up or not.

I forget where I left off yesterday. I think I was rambling about Montaigne and essays and blogs and English classes. Honestly I'm probably better off letting that particular train of thought derail. It is a bit interesting to muse on though.

Borrowed a copy of the Mac OS X Missing Manual by David Pogue. It looks to be a pretty good reference book. Will probably have to snag a copy for myself. I know I need to grab one for the iLife suite. I have no idea how you're supposed to puzzle through the workings of Garage Band. I don't remember too much difficulty with iMovie or iDVD, but it would be nice to get a bit more out of them.

At any rate, I'm home for the evening, there's some TV to be watched and some Tales of Symphonia to be played.

Beginning of the week

So the devil arrived in the form of Daylight Savings Time. There are occasions I wish it would go away. Any time during the summer in which we try o put a child to bed and it's still very bright out for instance.

Currently playing beat the clock against software update, so if this post seems oddly disjointed, I blame the update.

It was a pretty quiet weekend actually. Which is nice on occasion. Found out today that one of my favorite teachers from High School is getting ready to retire. That's a little crazy. I'll have to drop her a line and thank her for being a good influence. Or at least inspiring me to go for an English degree. Of course, the flip side to that is the complete impracticality of the English degree that doesn't lead to a teaching position, but we'll ignore that.

I wonder how blogging will impact English classes in the future. A guy I worked with for a while was going to use them (or at least make reference to them) in some of the English classes he was responsible for. They remind me (blogs that is) of the essay form. Montaigne was always a favorite of mine. Not that much of his influence makes itself known here. I should go back through some of his work again...

Coulton

Jonathan Coulton is rapidly becoming my favorite new musical artist. Last week's free mp3, RE: Your Brains was brilliant and this week's sounds like it might be pretty good as well. And I pushed Skullcrusher Mountain a couple weeks ago. At any rate, if you haven't listened to his stuff yet (I'm looking at you Kit) you really should. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Testing part 2

So the Google Blogger widget is freaking out on me. Trying out a new one. We'll see...

Quick Miranda story

Miranda has been under the weather pretty much the whole week. Sore throat, mild fever, pretty worn out. Doctor Amazing at first thought strep (tests came back negative) and then mono (again negative - and where would a 4 year old get mono anyway?) and is now considering other possibilities I suppose. Anyway, the story part follows - my wife was keeping an eye on her today while she was resting on the couch. At one point she looked up and said, "I've rested a lot this week, I need to do some exercises." So she got up and touched her toes 3 times or so. Then she looked up and said, "Ok, that's enough, I'm tired." And she proceeded to lay back down. Sounds about right to me...

Gamecube Easter Egg

Ran across the alternate startup sounds for the Gamecube. Apparently if you hold the Z button on either 1 or 4 controllers, you get an alternate sound sequence. That wacky Nintendo...

My wife and I have started trekking through Tales of Symphonia again. Sadly we started it back in 2004. I suspect we'll get through it by 2010... I only wish I were kidding.

Watched Mirrormask and Flightplan over the weekend. Mirrormask was pretty good. I was worried that Dave McKean's art would be a little too strange, but it was better than I expected. I'm not a huge fan of his, but in the context of the movie it worked surprisingly well. It's certainly different, but different can be good. It's very much an art film, but there's an alright little story at the core of it. It doesn't always make a ton of sense, but then what dreams do?

Flightplan, however, was horrid. Admittedly, I wasn't expecting much from it and it delivered. Gaping plot holes, a story that for the most part crept along and just general mind-numbing-ness. Keep walking past this one.

To give Jodie Foster some credit, her new one - Inside Man looks good...

A couple quick links

Fun with juggling.

And fun with reflexes.

Seems like I meant to put something else in here this afternoon, but alas, it has escaped my poor work week frazzled mind. Not that it was difficult mind you.

At any rate, have a great weekend.

GDC

So, the Game Developer's Conference is going on at the moment and today was Nintendo's keynote. Not much in the way of shiny new information, but some things of interest. Head over to Go Nintendo or Game|Life for details. They do have some bits about the new Brain Age game mental workout coming out in April and how Nintendo plans on applying that sort of theory to the Revolution and the DS. It should broaden their appeal quite a bit. I'm planning on picking up a copy for my wife. (Ok and myself as well...)

Other than that, I'm not sure there's much of interest going on.

Barbarian bits

So we watched Conan the Barbarian the other night. And while I have reasons why, none of them are that spectacular. A rather silly movie. My wife thought it should have been called Conan Gets Lucky... I supposed there is a little truth to that. It's funny what movies get made.

The Girl Scout Cookie hullaballoo is just about over. All the boxes are delivered and McKenna has just one more shift in front of the WalMart. She had more fun selling them than delivering them, but that comes as no surprise.

Resident Evil 4 is making a slight comeback. That game is just hard. Guitar Hero continues to dominate my play time though. We played a bit of Loot with my Mother-in-Law while she was here. That game gets pretty fun when you throw more people into the mix.

The letter 'r' would like to start up a podcast. I'd like to cover various board and card games. We certainly have enough to run through. And we could always throw in a video game or two every once in a while. We'll see if that materializes.

V is for Very Good

Go see V for Vendetta. Right now is fine. Powerful film. I'll not say more at the moment, but I liked it quite a bit. It's a little hard to say I enjoyed it (although there are certainly moments to enjoy) but I certainly appreciated it. The cast does an incredible job, especially Hugo Weaving - whose face is not seen the entire time. He uses his voice to great effect.

And with that have a great weekend.

More cowbell

err, guitar. Guitar Hero is far too addictive. And it gets really frustrating fun on the later levels. Adding in the other frets and a lot more notes to strum really increases the sensation of playing. I'd like to see Perfect Situations by Weezer in a sequel and some '80s hair band rock. And some... heh heh, well you get the idea.

The one thing this widget lacks is some html functionality. I'd like to see a link button and a few other tags. I'm not sure if you can code html into the text box or if it will convert it into text... This post will actually test that just a bit.

So, V for Vendetta comes out tomorrow. Despite Moore's disavowal, I'm going to go see it anyway. Hopefully it will be interesting. I'm hoping the Wachowski's didn't just re-hash bits of the Matrix movies with Moore's work...

So you wanna be a hero

First, I really like this blogger widget...

Anyway, I made the mistake the other day of trying out Guitar Hero while I was picking up DVDs at Best Buy. I had put off doing this because I am a sucker for music games. Especially when they involve special controllers - DDR, Donkey Konga the list goes on. But the demo unit was sitting there all alone and I felt the need to pick it up and see what it was like. Pure music Nirvana is a pretty close description. This game does an amazing job of helping you feel like you're rocking out. Anyone that has ever played an air guitar will fall in love. The guitar controller has a nice feel to it and the game does a good job of making you feel like you're actually contributing to the music.

If you make a mistake you'll hear a missed note, if you get in the groove the song sounds complete and you completely feel like you're on stage rocking. Especially on the higher difficulty levels. This may be one of the first music games where I never see some of the higher levels. The learning curve starts off easy enough but it ramps up and by the time you try out Hard, there are some serious strains on your rhythm skills.

I have to warn you, the game doesn't come cheap - the game/controller bundle runs around $80. But if you like music games at all, it's totally worth it. And as a touch of proof to this statement, I'll point out that my wife, who is normally pretty rhythmically challenged when it comes to video games, actually does pretty well on the Easy setting. It's actually a lot of fun watching her jam with the band. So if you fancy yourself a bit of a rocker, check Guitar Hero out.

We have contact

Ok, that's cool. You might be in luck and see a few more posts. At least short ones. I miss the link button for passing things along, but for quick thoughts this should do.

Expect a mini-review of a game in the next few days.

Blogging attempt 1 from Tiger

So I've finally managed to upgrade the computer to Tiger. Seems pretty slick so far. And I grabbed this blogger widget in a vague attempt to make posting a little more frequent. Or something. I realize this thing has been lagging lately and I apologize (a little) but life has been rather hectic of late.

We had an enjoyable weekend with the in-laws this past week. Some shopping, some game playing, lots of spoiling of the kids, but that's to be expected.

At any rate, let's submit this baby and see how it works...

Game update

Card games this time. Loot and In a Pickle are recent acquisitions. Loot is an interesting Pirate themed game that actually involves a bit of strategy. Your hand consists of Merchant ships with a point value, Pirate ships with an attack value, and possibly a Pirate captain or the Admiral. The pirate ships come in four colors. Once you attack a merchant ship with a specific color, your opponents have to use the remaining colors. You try to one-up your opponents in order to win the Merchant. At the end, the player with the most points wins. Clever and fun. Plus the artwork on the cards is rather fun.

In a Pickle is a game to play when you're in the mood for a good fight. In theory you play a card that is either smaller than the card at the top of the chain or bigger than the card at the bottom. At any time there are four chains to choose from and once one of the stacks reaches four cards each player then has to try and play a bigger thing at the bottom. In reality you spend most of the time arguing whether China is bigger than Spring or whether a skeleton in a jungle could fit in an Encyclopedia. If you can't handle a (hopefully) good natured argument on such things, stay away from this game. I kind of get a kick out of it...

The Cave was rather silly. And the ending was just best forgotten. It really should have ended with the escape, but they had to throw one last little twist in. Oh well.

The Brothers Grimm however was rather enjoyable. I'm sad I didn't go to the theater to watch it. Not just to see it on the big screen (which I'm sure was probably quite impressive) but to actually throw some monetary support its way. I think they did a pretty poor job of marketing this one. It's not really the comedy they made it out to be, although there is humor in it. In a lot of ways it's very reminiscent of the Grimm fairy tales themselves. An interesting story with touches of horror, humor and morality. Plus it's got Gilliam's fingerprints all over it, which is always nice. Reminded me a touch of The Fisher King. (Although that was better...)

March on

The year continues to speed by oblivious to any objections I might have. It is a little hard to believe it's already March. I'm not sure where the time is going, but I suspect I ought to visit there...

So, depending on your interests there's plenty of news out there. Gaming news is full of amusing anecdotes (track down the Penny Arcade/SOE donut war) and controversy (Chris Kohler over at Wired is suffering the fanboy onslaught over the graphical "capabilities" of the new Elder Scrolls game). In the political arena it looks like they're extending the Patriot Act again. In other news I'm sure there's a cute animal involved or possibly a kid.

Things around here are pretty much par for the course. The girls are either in trouble or causing it. But I suspect that's because I have to play parent now. It's amazing how much fun that sucks out of things. Well, at least from their perspective. The dog is probably developing some form of dementia. That or she's being possessed. I think I might have to root for possession. Finally managed to finish the first season of Lost but I'm not sure I can bring myself to care. Which is odd as it was an enjoyable show, but it just took us too long to get through. I'm most certainly ready to move on.

But hey, Bruce Campbell is working on They Call Me Bruce. Think Galaxy Quest meets Army of Darkness/Evil Dead. Pure comedy gold.