by Matt | Oct 17, 2005 | Friends and Family
Well, the party on Saturday went great. We ended up having about 12 people over. The usually gang came, along with some folks we haven’t seen in a while and a few new faces. Lauren’s cousin Blake stopped by which was cool, we never get to see him. Lauren’s friend from work Jin stopped by with her husband Steve. My friend Steve, known to the rest of the world as -=TCC=-KidChronic also stopped by and brought his wife Shelly. I’ve talked to KC for quite a while, even had lunch with him a few times, but this was the first time we got to hang out socially. I think our wifes hit it off, so, who knows, maybe we’ve found a couple to do things with on the weekends.
We ended up having far more food than we needed, but party food makes great leftovers, so I’ll be eating 7-layer dip, sausage-cheese dip and Chick-Fil-A chicken nuggets from a nugget tray for the next week or two.
We also have a large quantity of beer on hand. We got some Carona, Bud Light, Shiner, Shiner Blond and Killians and we’ve got about half of it left. Everyone was drinking, so I think we just ended up with so many because we over-bought.
We fired up the Xbox for a while, played some Super Monkey Ball party games, along with some Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate and finished off the night watching Longest Yard, which, I won’t bore you with a review of since thankfully, I had already consumer quite a few beers and I’ve already forgotten most of it… which is a good thing.
So, that was Saturday.
Sunday we just hung around here watching the Astros game, which they won, followed by a in-law sponsered trip to IHOP. After which Lauren and I decided to go catch Wallace and Gromit, which was very enjoyable. Better than last years I thought.
That leaves us with today.
After a rousing morning of chicken nuggets and web surfing, I’m about to sit down and watch Kung Fu Hustle. I’ve also gotten in a few rounds of BF2. Say hello to Staff Sargent Doc 🙂
One last thing before I go, a question for Jason. Any recomendations on some new tunes to listen to? Lately I’ve been dipping back into some classics and haven’t gotten any new music in a while. At The Drive In and Bowling for Soup are the last things I’ve listened to. Any suggestions on something new and exciting?
As a thank-you, I present this link (here). I’m constantly surprised by the internet. Not only are there other game-playing, music downloading, hockey watching people such as myself, but that there’s enough of them sharring the wonder of hockey with the world that it warrents it’s own category, updated weekly with games anyone might have missed. It’s a wonderful thing.
by Matt | Oct 14, 2005 | Games
If you’re looking for xbox party games, look no further than Fusions Frenzy, Super Monkey Ball, Whacked and Kung Fu Chaos. All are highly recommended… Especially when the guests have been drinking.
by Matt | Oct 14, 2005 | Culture, Web
The mere fact that I can write a post while I’m using the restroom has to be some sort milestone for human ingenuity. Seriously. The web while you poop, right up there with the wheel, flight and the lightbulb.
Moving on.
Has anyone ever bothered to do any of those “free Something” websites? FreeIpod, freeXbox, etc. I’ve looked at half a dozen of them and briefly considered giving it a try. All the “I didn’t think it was real but here it is” testimonials are starting to sway me. Free iPods or free GameBoys I could live without. A free laptop or a free Mac Mini however, that might peak my interest.
The only problem becomes getting 10 other people to get “free” trial offers of pointless crap so you can get your thing. And no, I’m not going to ask any of you to sign your life over for 6 months of Entertainment Weekly magazine. What I might do, as any good hacker/pirate from my generation would, is socially engineer 9 other people. That means “make them up” for you younger folks just joining the program.
We’ll see if I have the motivation.
Besides that, I’m also toying with the idea of starting a group editorial news/blog page. You of course would be invited to join. I could envision myself writing about games and tech, Jason about music maybe, Nagle about art/design and cool web stuff, Chip and Chris about tech and programming and other cool stuff. I’m fairly serious about it though. I’d want to go at it hardcore, really try and make something out of it. I dunno. You guys even interested in something like that. I’d covering the setup and hosting costs, but would you guys want to contribute if given the chance?
by Matt | Oct 7, 2005 | Aggravation
You know all those problems I’ve been having with my internet. Remeber that most of my packet loss from from Level3, outside Dallas. Well, check this shit out:
Blackout shows Net’s fragility
“The source of [the] difficulties is a feud between two big backbone Internet companies–the long-haul networks that most consumers and even most businesses ordinarily have little to do with. One of these companies, Level 3 Communications, has cut off direct communications with rival Cogent Communications, causing many of each company’s customers to lose access to potentially significant swatches of the Net.
…
It’s impossible to say precisely how many people are affected. Many customers of the two companies, and customers of the ISPs that use one of the networks, buy connections from several providers simultaneously to avoid outages of this kind. However, many businesses, individuals and even some ISPs have so-called single-homed network connections, which means they depend on a single provider to reach the Internet.
…
According to Cogent, between 5 percent and 10 percent of its customers were affected. Level 3 did not provide an estimate. Because some of those customers could be ISPs with thousands or hundreds of thousands of their own customers, the number of people affected could range into the millions.”
Someone will die. Death. The End. Finito. If I find out that the reason my internet sucks balls is because these two are having a pissing contest, I litterly will file a complaint with the atorney general and see what my legal options are. I’m not fucking around. I’m so angry it’s giving me a migrain.
Oh, and because I’m so pissed, here are the main 3 phone numbers for Level3. I publish these because I want them to know what it means to fuck with a geeks internet,
These numbers are all in Colorado.
1. 303-410-7294
2. 720-888-1000
3. 925-398-3000
Fuck’em. Death from above!
by Matt | Oct 5, 2005 | Culture
There’s about a million things I’d like to mention and at present I lack the motivation to discuss any of them at great length. It’s not that they’re unworthy topics, it’s just that I’m lazy.
I could be telling you about DiggNation, the weekly podcast I’m addicted to, and it’s bigger brother This Week In Tech. Both shows have redefined the way I think about online audio content and I highly recommend both. The easiest thing to do is to get the new version of iTunes OR (my personal preference) the latest version of Winamp. Both programs have both shows available in the Podcast sections of their respective media browsers.
As a preface to DiggNation, I should also mention I was a very early adopter of Digg.com. Which, btw, is like sex for your browser. Customizable RSS feeds, social bookmarking, tech/game/cool stuff news around the clock. Must check this one out if you’re not already addicted like I am.
I might also mention things like the new BF2 patch (news). Download. It’s quasi-helpfulness in some areas lead many to believe that yet again, EA Games has failed to properly support it’s products. I can see many things this patch fixed and yet there are hundreds more things that need addressing before we can call this game complete. Instead of putting out a few more patches and fixing a few bugs, EA has already moved on to it’s first expansion pack. Lame. Battlefield2: Special Forces should more accurately be called “BF2: All the things we forgot the first time”.
As part of that update, the stat system within BF2 was changed tremendously. The ranks, as they were, were very spread out, causing the average person to have to play the game for approx. 2 years before unlocking all the content. EA realized this was a problem and lowered the requirements for ranks and unlocks for the first few levels. So, as a result, most people jumped 2 or 3 ranks the next time they logged in, triggering massive unlocks and upgrades. Myself I went from Lance Corporal to Staff Sargent in about 30 seconds. You can get an explination of the new ranks here. You can also check out my personal stats incase you’re curious.
That leads me to website updates, because that’s something I’m planning on including. I’m going to embed some BF2 info over here in the rightside navigation menu. Probably a little “on/off” logo to say when I’m playing and two small lines for rank and global score. Nothing big or intrusive. I’m also going to update those links a bit, put a few more up and probably change this entire template from light whites/grays to dark grays and blacks with some glow effects here and there. That is, if I have time.
Also, some TCC tshirts are finally going to be printed up. I’m going to make a small run for myself and a few Crew members but afterwards, I’m going to set up a SpreadShirt.com store (a bit more flexible than CafePress) to take future orders.
Of course we can’t have an update without talking about those RedSox. Jesus guys, you trying to make me have a heart attack or what? Talk about down to the last friggin game. At least they spanked the yankees good in that last regular season game. It’s a shame that even though their records are identical the Sox get the wild card while the Yankees get the division. That’s a bullshit rule about the better record versus each other. What’s also bullshit is the home/away rule being decided by the All-Star game. Game two is tonight, I’ll be watching, and a few of you probably will too.
I also wanted to quickly mention this month being a jackpot for gamers. With the release of this new BF2 patch, Quake 4 coming out in 2 weeks and Call of Duty 2 and Civ4 coming out in just 3, October is going to be kick ass. Call of Duty was THE best WW2 game ever made. Period. I’m not talking multiplayer (we all know where my allegance lies with that) but I’m talking about single player and story-wise. COD was beautiful and judging by the demo I checked out today, COD2 will be more so. Civ4 on the other hand, answers my addiction on a whole new level. I STILL play Civ3 to kill time. It’s that good. It’s perfection in terms of gameplay, AI and strategy. Civ 4 is going to take that and add 3D (Pirates engine) and raise the bar through the roof. Quake4 I’m excited about simply for nostalgia sake. I started with Quake, moved to HL, then to CS and finally BF, now it’s all full circle.
Finally, I’d like to say congrats to both Chip and Lauren for their new jobs. Both have been looking for a while and it’s great to know both of them found what they were looking for. So, congrats to Chip on a new job, and congrats to Lauren for changing jobs to something less stressful and more lucrative.
That’s about it kids. I’m out.
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