November 2004 Archives

I brought home a tablet this weekend in case I needed it in finishing the wiring in Travis's parents house. I didn't need it however, everything was smooth there. I have been using it all day today. It enabled me to watch HD NFL Sunday Ticket on the 65" while doing web stuff. I updated the DVD lists and did some blog entries. Need to stop now and do my normal Sunday of reading the Washington Post.

The more I play Halo 2 MP the more I like it. Bungie even already tweaked one of the complaints about starting games taking too long. I have already made it to a level 7 ranking, you advance as you play and win games. I can't wait to try it with a bunch of other people in the house again.

I have now played Half-Life 2 for about 5 hours. Great game thus far. One of if not the best single player game I have ever played. Lots of interesting environments, varied game types and good storyline. Also it has a really good physics engine with lots of things in the game to move and play with. I even managed to get to places I wasn't really supposed to by stacking things into a pyramid. I am anxious to see where the storyline goes. It is still developing and confusing. Highly recommended game.

Today I logged into my blog and again saw 30+ plus spam comments. This is really not a lot considering that I get over 100 pieces of spam email a day. The difference is that my email is automatically filtered by Cloudmark's Safteybar and I never see it. On my blog I have to manually delete it and the interface is cumbersome at best. I found a small script on another website that allowed me to clean them up more easily. Thanks to Dav from AkuAku for making my life easier.

I finally got around to updating my DVD list today. My mom wanted to borrow some so I wanted to let her see what is current. It was mid-April the last time I updated the list. The ones with the X's are what I have gotten since then.

I am finishing up the install of Half-Life 2 right now. It will most likely be as good as Halo 2 and Doom 3 put together. It has graphics of Doom 3 and story (and then some) of Halo 2. I will report in later.

Well I beat the single player portion of Halo 2 on Saturday. It was very enjoyable but distressingly short. It took less than 10 hours to beat, maybe 7-8. The story was great but was a cliff hanger. It felt very much like the last 2 Matrix movies, where it was just cut in the middle. I am interested to see what happens next, Halo 3 or downloadable content? Travis even helped me finish the last level, at the time we didn't know it was the last level of course.

Now the other half of game will have to do, multiplayer. I have played online a bunch as well, great fun.

I got Halo 2 on Tuseday and as soon as I got home started playing it. Roger, Travis and I played online on Live for a while. You can see some of the stats here. It is amazing the amount of stats per game Bungie collects and the fact that currently they are monitoring close to one million games a day.

I have played the single player for a few hours so far, very good so far as well. Hopefully it continues to be as good.

We also had our fist Halo 2 party last night. We only had 8 people, hopefully the next we can bump that up higher. Lots of fun as well.

A little while ago one of our TiVo's had a prompt about volunteering for a new from of Nielsen research. I figured I would volunteer and see what happens. This morning Nielsen called and asked a few questions and verified my desire to participate. Now my TiVo habits will form the ratings for the entire country. Woo hoo.

Just in time to start on Halo 2 I finished Doom 3 yesterday. It took me 3 months of on and off playing. The total time was about 20-30 hours I think. It was a impressive game, but not always a fun game. It used the basic premise of being in the dark and things jumping out of walls at you too much. The same thing over and over and over. Just got tiring being that tense all the time. You never got to explore it was just always non-stop surpriese. It was fun for a while but got old after a while. Also the final boss was easier than the next to last. I would probably recommend it, but not as highly as I would have thought. The upside though is the engine is amazing. I can't wait to see what other developers do with what John Carmack has designed.

We have quite a free very pretty trees in our yard. The only problem with them is they have a immense amount of leaves. Today raked for 2 hours and got half of the front yard done. I wanted to go to the Halo thing or I would have gone longer. Probably do more tomorrow. Of course they are still falling still as well, hopefully the majority are done falling.

Today I went to a pre-release party for Halo 2. It was setup by the Washington Post, more specifically the Inside Source. I thought it was just going to be a few TV's and some copies of Halo 2. It was that and some other stuff too. They gave everyone in attendance a free headset for XBox Live. The best part though was that two guys from Bungie were there to chat with everyone. One of the guys is part of the two man team that did all the primary scripting and for the single player cinematics. The other was the lead tester for the Live multiplayer component. It was really cool to talk these guys and here some of their stories about the Halo 2 development. It was a fun day. I can't wait until Tuesday when I get my own copy.

I made it to my polling place about 30 min before closing. There was no line at check in and then a line about 5 deep at each of the 8 voting machines. The lines were moving quickly. In Fairfax county there was the presidential election as well as House of Representatives and quite a few Fairfax county bond issues. The machines this year were new touch screens. They were mounted flat and were about 15-17" big. When you clicked on something a BIG RED check showed up. I would hope it is almost impossible to be confuesed by this. At the end 75-80% of the screen turned in to a flashing vote button. Worked well I think.

After voting I went to 7-Eleven and surpisingly they coke slurpee machine was a perferct mix. A perfect slurpee is a sight to behold. Very tasty.

Travis and I will be holding down the CrackerJames Republican fort tonight. Roger is down at Jim's supporting the other guys.