Tidied up a bit.
Andrea’s been in cleaning mode all day, and I caught it a little bit. Decided to clean up the computer room a bit. Moved my tower up onto the desk so it’s easier to get to. And cleaned up all the junk on my desk. Decided to take a picture while it’s actually looking decent! Yeah, I have my Windows OS running…I just got done playing some Guild Wars.
My uber geek station.
Sweet! A dryer!
Sweet! The 1981 models are out!
Well, I’m on my lunch break and just got our new (to us) dryer hooked up. We got it last night for the princly sum of $50. It’s got the sweet fake woodgrain topped control panel, which I am CERTIAN will soon be back in style.
I tried hooking the vent up last night. They gave us some sort of flat duct thing that you can slide right up next to the wall, and I did my best to duct tape it to the dryer and to the vent going outdoors…that didn’t work so well. The dryer moves a good volume of air and it gets quite hot (both good things) but it got hot enough to goo up the duct tape to the point it wasn’t sticky any more. At which point it just blew the duct right off the dryer. Well that ain’t going to work!
So I picked up some real duct work and metal clamps. I can’t slide it as close to the wall, but it’s a nice tight seal, and works like it should. I’d throw some laundry in and have it dry while I’m at work, but I’d like to be home to keep an eye on it for at least the first couple run thoughs. If a 30 year old dryer is going to burst into flames, I’d like to be there to stop the blaze before it consumes the rest of our belongings!
Just another day…
I could still be wrong…
Happy Birthday Andrea!
Andrea is 24 today! No privlages to speak of, but I have to do whatever she says all day long. Not too different from every other day!
Love you, sweetheart!
A look back: GoldenEye 007
Much has been written and said about this one. It wasn’t just an influential game for me, for millions of people (8 million to be more precise) this game revolutionized shooting games and the multiplayer experience. For the industry, it shaped every game in the genre that would come after it. For me, it was just as…if not more significant than Mario Kart 64.
Like many others, to me this game began as a mystery. Through the same channel I’d received my Star Fox promotional VHS tape, I also got a manila folder gussied up to look like an MI6 intelligence dossier. Inside were various screenshots of the game, lists of all the weapons, and all sorts of stuff to whet the appetite. At the time most of my Bond experiences were flipping through channels and seeing sweet car chases. I liked James Bond movies, but certianly not the kind of fan people think of me as today. Read the rest of this entry »
10.1.08Cheap gas?
I got up and headed to work this morning and my low gas light was FLASHING at me. It’d been dinging for a couple days, but since I only have a couple miles to drive to work, I wasn’t too concerned about it. But I figured since it’d gone the extra step to get my attention, I’d go ahead and fill up.
I’ll admit I was almost giddy when I saw the sign reading $3.15 for regular gasoline! I haven’t seen it that low for a long time! Still kinda sad that I’m getting excited about gas being over $3.00. I still think it’ll get down into the lower $2.00 range, though it might be a couple years from now. People say I’m crazy for thinking that. But I bet back in the 80’s people never thought that gas would be less than $1.00 again, but I sure remember it being 73 cents back in 1997.
Sad thing is, when I was filliing up this moring, the pump had a $50 limit on it, so I still couldn’t quite get a full tank. Hopefully gas keeps going down and it’ll have worked out!
09.29.08A look back: Star Fox 64
I feel like this installment should start off with MY first impression of Star Fox 64. Please watch the following:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBF3X3ZaS2Q]
At some point in time I must have signed up to recieve Nintendo promotional material. One day a VHS tape showed up with the above video on it. I held onto the tape for the longest time, but I think I finally parted with it just a couple years ago. This game came out shortly after Independence Day and I recall the scene where the UFO settles over the pyrimad seeming errily familiar.
When I got PilotWings 64 back on that Christmas day, this is what I was expecting. Not that I was disappointed with PilotWings, just that I had to wait this long for a game I had imagined on that day. This was all out aerial assault. At the time it really felt like you were in the cockpit of a fighter. You had the ability to lock on to enemies and launch guided shots at them. You could do flips and of course you could “Do a barrel roll!”
For the time, this game was slightly different in that it was designed to be played in one sitting. No save points or anything like that. Think the old Super Mario games where you either had to leave the machine on while you were away, or sit down and kick Bowser’s butt right then and there. This approach, however, left me feeling a bit disappointed in how short the game was. By this time I was used to getting a new game and spending the next couple weeks beating and mastering it. Despite the short gameplay, the “hard” route which required you to accomplish all bonus/hidden objectives did provide some challenge and there were medals you could earn for accuracy.
I believe one of the objectives of this game was to show off some of the technical abilities of the Nintendo 64. It was the first game on the system to use voice acting in any significant form. Due to storage restrictions on the N64 carts, the audio was quite compressed. All the voices were over your ship’s “radio” channel, and due to the compression they sounded very walkie-talkie like. But in the context of the game, the audio quality could almost be perceived as intentional.
But undoubtedly the game was primarily to showcase Nintendo’s new peripheral the “Rumble Pak”. One of Nintendo’s console innovations that is now common place today. You plugged this into the controller where the Memory Paks go, and it provides variable vibrations depending on what happens to your character. While novel, I never really found it much more immersive than without it. Give me a good subwoofer that will let me feel explosions, and I’m much happier!
My biggest disappointment with this game was…never having anyone to play multiplayer with! The multiplayer mode in this game was fantasitc! However when people came over, we always ended up playing Mario Kart or later, GoldenEye. I was never phenominally good, but no one else ever seemed willing to endure the learning curve long enough to stay interested, and thus all my multiplayer matches were short-lived.
Still a great game, but now hard to go back to because it is so short and predictable. If I had some friends to play with, however…I could multiplayer into the night. Bryan where are you!?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU-a6ZkF0io]
Quote of the day
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too. – Oscar Levant
SNL Tina Fey as Gov. Sarah Palin
She had left the SNL scene, but HAD to come back to do these parodies of the Govenor of Alaska and VP running mate of Senator McCain. I wonder if she’ll come back to do some more after Palin does some more interviews…. We’ll just have to wait and watch SNL every Saturday night!
NBC has removed these videos from Youtube, so I couldn’t embed them into the post. They are linked to the NBC site, so if there are commercials before the video, I’m sorry.