Man....

I'm having one of those days where you think everything you are doing is going to work out ok, but doesn't. thank Gord I get to go on vacation soon!

Much love...

Props to the old friend who inspired the name of the old Hewlett Packard 8550 Printer in my office!

Finally a George Bush Policy I Can Endorse...

The Viper is Coming...

12/20/07 - 12/27/07

That is SO going on my blog...

This is Halloween!

For those of you that don't know...Chicago is the Halloweenest City on the planet. The epicenter is the Chicago Cultural Center where I work. Every year the Mayor hosts his Halloween Ball here. My building is so fantastically Halloweeney right now I am GIDDY!

Happiness is...

getting a box of sponge candy at work from your parents! I love you Mom & Dad!

Why You (Goose) Should Upgrade Your PC

A friend of mine was ruminating on his blog if he should upgrade his PC. Well, the obvious answer to this is... yes. He's primarily a console gamer but has been known to dabble in the PC game realm. So why should someone upgrade their PC? Why to play games of course. What other reason is there to own a PC? Here are some specific reasons that a person should upgrade their PC. The best reason for upgrading a PC that I can see is the advent of Direct X 10. This new graphics standard which is a core component of Windows Vista is slated to bring us a wonderful crop of new games in the next coming months.

1. The Orange Box - Easily the best deal going in video gaming at the moment. For a little over 50 bucks you get 5 complete games in one! This package from Valve software contains: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. While you can get this package for Xbox360 I would recommend the PC version. The only draw back to the PC version is actually a strength. Installing and playing the game on PC requires the use of Steam. Steam is Valve's online software distribution platform. (Think Xbox Live) Unlike X-Box Live it is free to join and maintain an account. Steam authenticates your games for copy protection purposes, but also allows you to manage friends, download demos and even purchase full games. Purchased games are tied to your account, so if you have multiple PC's (like say you are getting a laptop for work wink...wink) all you need to do is install the steam client on that PC to and it will download all of your games to that system without the need for software disks to install. The biggest draw back to Steam is that I think it requires you to have an active internet connection to play games through it. However, I think certain games can be played off line. One other feature that makes The Orange Box such a great value is that Steam supports a great many user created mods for the Half-life series. Allowing you to play original games such as Goldeneye: Source (a free multi player version of the N64 Classic) or DBSource another mod based on the Dragon Ball Z universe. With the amount of mods that are sure to be released in the future this could almost be the only game you ever need to buy again. I would go into more detail about the individual parts of the actual Orange Box, but I think I have written enough previously about the stellar Team Fortress 2.
2. BioShock - Yep, it's out on Xbox360, but if you want to see this game running as pretty as it can be you should play it on PC. I run it under Direct x 9, and it is astounding. I am curious to see what this game is going to look like with DX10 hardware.
3. Supreme Commander - I am not much for real time strategy games, but this one is supposed to be pretty awesome. Another DX10 game, the crazy thing about this game is apparently the level of depth that you can use to control the game. Battles can contain hundreds of unit per side. This game allows you to scale your view of the battle out to almost a global perspective, and the battles can become so huge that the game has built in support for dual monitors.
4. Spore - A game slated for release next year being developed by Will Wright. (The genius behind just about anything with the word SIM in it's title.) This game looks like it will be the ultimate "God" game. You basically create an organism and guide it through it's evolution from a single cell organism to a creature to a society and then to a space faring civilization. The amazingly compelling thing about this game is that players will be able to make their races available to download by other players. As you download other players races of creatures they will populate the universe that you explore with your space traveling race. Allowing you to interact with the creations of players from all over the world. The possibilities of this game cause the mind to boggle.
5. Crysis - If there is one game that the editors of PC Gamer magazine all seam to be going crazy waiting for this would be the one. This is one of the first games that will truly show off what DX10 can do. Apparently even DX9 demo versions being shown at trade shows have been mind blowing displaying totally destructive jungle environments and a fantastic enemy AI.
6. Microsoft Flight Simulator X - Perhaps the first DX10 game released. It sounds pretty cool. I have never been into flight simulators, but the fact that this game features accurately mapped photo realistic maps of THE ENTIRE WORLD it is certainly tempting. Yes, you can fly a plane from the Buffalo Airport to Toronto is real time. How bad a$$ is that?
   

Well, that is just a sample of some of the great reasons out there to own a PC and get that puppy upgraded. Enjoy.

HAPPY CAPS LOCK DAY!!!!

TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY! SO YELL YOUR HEAD OFF!

Pete's ABC Adventure

Plenty to ponder this fine Monday morning...

This post is being presented to you in bullet-point vision because I am too lazy to pay attention to things like formatting this morning.

• Once again, "In Mark's Head" was not recognized for it's outstanding contributions toward raising awareness of important stuff. Some how I will survive. Somehow.... Gordie Howe... Krakow...Kung Pao...I'll stop now.
• Milk Cow...
• So there were some great football games on yesterday. The Bears beat the Eagles with a last second drive at the end of a pretty darn boring game. I am happy that the Bears won. The season was starting to look like it could veer down the path of depressing. A loss yesterday certainly would have made for a long season. The Bears certainly are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. They have yet to show me that they are as good of a team as they think they are. Until they can start to play on offense with the full potential of their players, and the Bears do have talented players especially in the receiving spots and not rely on Devin Hester returning kicks to be the sole source of their offense I will remain skeptical. Which is always a healthy attitude for a Chicago sports fan to have anyway.
• I am still not awake. It's 9:46.
• I went over to my buddy Leo's place to watch football yesterday. He has an awesome TV. However, can someone please answer me this? Why was I not able to watch the last 2 minutes of the Houston / Tennessee game? This was easily the most exciting game of the weekend. It was decided by on sides kicks and a last second field goal that set the record for the most field goals by a kicker in an NFL game. However, instead of being able to watch the drama of this game unfold live I was forced to watch the conclusion through highlights and piss poor horrid commentary from the ABC studio crew. (Or whatever network it was.) The talking heads in studio kept talking about some rule that was preventing them from showing the game. What kind of BS rule is this? Who would make up a rule that would not allow you to show the end on an exciting game? It was embarrassing, and certainly did not benefit ether party. The NFL suffered fans not being able to see the conclusion of an exciting game and a record setting performance. The network suffered through what might have been the most painful 15 minutes of sports television broadcasting EVER! The talking heads that have been assembled for the networks post game round table tried their best to provide a play by play recap of the action in the final moments of this game, but really only served to illustrate that play by play broadcasting is in fact a skill that none of these men possessed. What ever this stupid rule was that prevented them from showing the end of the game is a REALLY FREAKING STUPID RULE!
• So I had the audition for the competitive Team Fortress 2 clan this past Saturday. Sadly, I did not make the cut for the actual clan. At least the team I was assigned to managed to win the tournament in sudden death by eliminating all the opposing players with mere seconds remaining on the clock. I am not surprised that i was not selected. To help my team out I elected to play as a defensive engineer as opposed to the medic class which is my strongest class. I stunk it up in this role. All I can do is keep practicing and hope for a better shot when the audition for the remaining 6 spots on the clan come around in 2 weeks.

Well that is all for now...Keep on Rockin' in the free world!

My Sister the Journalist

My sister Joanna got a letter published in the Buffalo News. Check it out!

Which Do You like Better

Having some fun with photoshop today.

I Think I Owe Someone an Appology...

So a few weeks ago on my friend Goose's blog I may have made some rather negative and uninformed comments about the game Metroid Prime: Corruption for the Nintendo Wii. I would humbly like to retract or at least revise my rather harsh words. I had the chance to sit down and watch my buddy Ryan play Metroid for a good while last night, and I must say that I was very impressed. The game looks great. Really great actually. Initially I had a difficult time focusing on the action of the game and separating it from the visor HUD that appears as a ghost overlay. However, as I kept watching I was really happy with what I saw. The game feels like you are playing through an interactive version of Tron. This is a good thing. In fact the visuals of Metroid combined with the control scheme of the Wii just might be the closest we can get right now to a virtual reality experience without wearing a stupid looking helmet. Being a fan of FPS's on the PC one thing about Metroid that really impressed me, and this is an extreme credit to the thoughtful design of the game is how natural the platforming elements of the game were integrated into the game as a whole. usually when a FPS includes platform elements into the play they have a way of feeling unnecessairly frustrating. Not so in this case.

I still don't think I would want to own a Wii. If I did want a Wii, Metroid would certainly be the game to get me in the door though. Sorry, I just don't like the controls. I think this has more to do with the fact that i have decided to become very set in my ways video game wise. (I sometimes think the Play Station controller has too many buttons on it.)

So Goose, I am sorry for blasting your beloved Wii. I do think I would take you Mouse & Keyboard vs. Wii Mote though.

Argh....

I had a great idea for a post last night and I can't remember what it is...

Why does it take so FRACKING long to transfer 5.8 GB to a portable drive? Seriously. If I had kids they would be in college by the time this finishes.

So I am going to be auditioning for a Team Fortress 2 competative team this weekend. I am sort of geeked by this. A little nervous too, seeing as how I know that there are much better players out there then me. However, I am currently the #3 ranked Medic on the team's website, so hopefully that bodes well for me. Wish me luck!

Can't believe I forgot!

I met Marv Levy this week! Really nice guy.

I'm Proud

As I discussed in my last post. i hate fantasy football because it was forcing me to hope that my beloved Buffalo Bills got their faces stomped in by the Foul and Evil Spawn of the Devil Dallas Cowboys (who I predict will win the Superbowl this year) so that Tony Romo and Julius Jones would score enough points to allow me to beat the first place team in my fantasy league. Well, it looks like I lost on both accounts. Romo was beaten badly by the Bills defense and Julius Jones contributed an entire 4 points to my losing fantasy effort. On top of that, I didn't get the satisfaction of knowing that my loss in fantasy football could be eased by a Buffalo victory. I lost twice yesterday. I must say though, that I managed to tune into a bit of the game last night for most of the 3rd quarter. (I had to watch "How I Met Your Mother" and "Heroes" after all.) Let me say, that despite the game resulting in a loss I was so proud to watch the Bills defense take it to the cocky Cowboys and make them fight for every inch of field and point on the score board. It was a game that I am sure most people (myself included) expected to be a massacre. I loved watching the Bills playing with a reckless "You might beat us, but we won't make it easy." attitude! Yeah Buffalo!

Why I HATE Fantasy Football.

Tonight I have to hope the freaking Cowboys pound the stuffing out of the Bills so that my Fantasy team will win. I am rooting for the Coowboys to beat the Bills. This freaking sucks.

Please

Please tell me that someone else thinks it is really cool that I played Team Fortress 2 with two of the editors of PC Gamer Magazine last night. I even out scored them in a couple of games!

Seriously...

Anyone remember what we did before Google? Perhaps I'll look it up on Wikipedia.

Team Fortress 2

This game is Da Bomb!
I can't kill anyone, but usually lead my team in points as a Medic. Once a healer always a healer I guess.

Everything is coming up Milhouse...

I've been having a good run recently. My most recent show closed this past weekend, and was a smashing success. "The Book of Liz" sold out every performance! Which was awesome. We'll be remounting in January in case you missed it the first time around, and I will be stage managing for the remount. I've also stumbled upon my next production as well. I attended a read through for a play called "Lipstick Traces" last night. The show is kind of hard to explain, but it revolves around the Sex Pistols. (Awesome!) Also, apparently Johnny "Rotten" Lydon is a huge fan of the show, and has attended performances of the show every time it has been produced! (AMESOMER!) Oh, and I'm going to get paid to design the show... (AMESOMEST!) No, folks things have been on a positive swing for the moment. Looks like I'll delay the whole jumping in front of a train thing for a little while longer. More to come... Here. Enjoy this awesome!

Hmmmm....

1. Die Hard on Christmas
   
2. Disorder by Joy Division
   
3. Saske Uchiha (Close enough)