Black Friday

Well, I went out shopping today to get into the holiday spirit and join the crowds. Actually though, it was a very painless experience in terms of crowds. Staples, Circuit City, a local camera store, EB Games all seemed less busy than normal. Best Buy was Best Buy so it was pretty terrible, but still, nothing all that bad. Definately much better than back in PA where all the stores worth shopping at are all in the same mall or within 1 mile of said mall. Nashville is a little more spread out so I think this city can handle the crowds a bit better. OK, here's the damage report.

-Bought a wireless router and notebook card. Got the router and wireless network up and running really quick. Couldn't get my old Dell with the new card to connect to the network though, but I'll have more time in December.
-Bought a 512mb Memory Stick Pro for my future digital camera that I'll be buying myself for Christmas.
-Bought 6 games at EB for around $90. Manhunt, Return of the King, and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow on PC and Prince of Persia, Kingdom Hearts and the Mega-Man collection on PS2.
-Bought "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Edward Scissorhands" on DVD at Best Buy. They had already sold out of "Mean Girls" a little after 10am so that was kind of dissapointing (its such a funny movie, definately worth the $10 they were charging for it).

After all the shopping, my mom and I had lunch at Olive Garden. Ugh, two days of filling my stomach to capacity not good. I need to not eat for the next 3 days I think. Anyway, thats about it. Its good to actually be able to use my own computer here at home (now I have less reason to ever leave my room).

Thanksgiving. . .I'm thankful that my car made it here

OK, nothings really wrong with my car, except for the oil leak but that hasnt killed the engine yet. Anyway, onto my travels and Thanksgiving.

I left NC much later than I expected to, hit some rain and got caught up in traffic yet still made it here to Nashville in about 8 hours (it usually takes me 7). Had some dinner, messed around on the computer for a bit (admiring the fact that my moms computer isn't completely dead anymore. . .yay for more RAM) and then went to sleep. Woke up Thursday, watched some TV and then went to have Thanksgiving day lunch/dinner at 2. So much food. . .soo good! I need to get honey-baked ham for my apartment and always keep some prepared. When we got home, I looked through all the ads for tomorrow and tried to figure out what I could possibly use. So, tomorrow I get to wake up very early and try to get nifty things. On the list are

1. Wireless router and laptop card


2. Stuff for my digital camera that I don't have yet (give me time, its gonna be an Xmas gift to myself)


3. some video games maybe (as if I don't have enough to keep me busy


4. some dvd's


5. and maybe some clothes (as my mom says, I can't go to interviews in jeans and t-shirts and expect to get hired)

Apart from getting up early and shopping, I really need to do some homework tomorrow too. I was planning on doing stuff after Thanksgiving food but we stayed and chatted for far too long. So, tomorrow I really need to add code to my webpage for CIS320 (yay for adding auto-send email stuff), try to find images that I can edit for my digital art final project (boo digital art), and maybe think about what I want my database design to be like. And thats totally ignoring the work I have to do on my personal website and on my programming project. Thanksgiving break. . .HA! More like Thanksgiving "here's a bunch of food and other things to distract you from the 500 million things you have due within 3 days after you get back to NC."

Half-Life 2 Update:
Didn't make too much progress since last posting. Played for about 15 minutes this morning after waking up. I'm far less effective at killing zombies when I'm half asleep. I also got killed for the first time in the game. Damn you black head crabs. . .damn you and your ability to instantly put my health at 1!

Some /. for ya. . .

In case you don't /. here's some interesting stories I've seen recently. By interesting I mainly mean in terms of gaming. . .


1)Massive Multiplayer Gaming Warehouses On The Way
-This sounds like it may be incredible. When I was in Australia, all the cities had multiple locations where anyone could go, pay $2 or so and have internet access for 30 minutes or more (if they wanted to pay more). This seems to be taking that concept to another level. $5/hr to have access to a huge TV and some of the best gaming equipment available. . .sounds decent.



2)Some Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 schtuf
-Since I got my new laptop in August, I've pretty much gotten bored with console games and Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are without question the biggest technological breakthroughs, in terms of video games, this year. Personally, I think Half-Life 2 was a bit over-hyped with what we got. Granted, it absolutely obliterates Doom in the sense of keeping a fairly high and steady frame rate (50 in HL2 compared to the 30 or so I got in Doom). However, I think that the Doom 3 engine is far more impressive in terms of TRUE realism, which is to me sound AND visuals.
Anyway, back to that story. Nausea. . .wtf? Definately missed that part of the airboat ride. And then, there's using HL2 textures in the Doom 3 engine. Strange, but I think it can totally be done, and the pictures included in the link from the /, story show that. However, I think the real test would be trying to take Doom 3 textures and throw them at the Source engine. I'd be willing to bet Source wouldn't be able to handle it. OK, I've blabbed enough about this.
In closing. . .Half-Life 2 = great game, great new technology (Source) but Doom 3 = great game, better new technology (when playing the game, its very tough to remember that it is just a game when you have high-resolution zombies coming out of shadows, demons screeching all around you and a single eerie light swinging overhead and having to deal with constantly moving shadows).

I'll post more news as I see fit. And I'll also be posting progress reports in Half-Life 2 as well. Currently, I'm in the "scary" part, a city full of zombies and headcrabs and death-traps by the name of Ravenholm. Besides the non-human inhabitants, there's a crazy preist who seems to enjoy blowing the crap out of zombies. And people say he's insane. . .
Oh yeah. . .I likey the gravity gun. Picking up huge saw blades and hurling them at zombies is fun. Since there's a grav gun mod for Doom 3, all we need now are the saw blades and then Doom 3 would have all the fun stuff that Half-Life 2 currently has. Well, except for the hot lead female character. . .

Joining the geeks

OK, as if it wasn't official before. . .I'm officially joining the league of Geeks. In digital art class today, I was bored and looking at things on Newegg. Now, I have been wanting to get one of those small USB drives for a while now, but I didn't think it was justified unless it would have at least 1gb of storage and be under $100. Well, on Newegg today, they had this. Now its showing up as $74 but when I ordered it, it was only $65. So, the final outcome: 1gb of storage in a pen drive the size of my pinky for $70 shipped. Nice!

Welcome to the Blog

Due to the fact that I don't update my LiveJournal anymore and I had to create a Blogger account so I could post on the Elon ACM blog, I figured I'd set one up myself for my personal webpage, which I'm currently working on revamping. This blog will serve as the central index page, where I'll post anything I like and link to various other pages I have created for my site. Hopefully I'll get it all figured out and working the way I want to sometime in the near future. Until then, cool your jets. . .this site is a work in progress and it will eventually progress until its done.