I know I missed last week’s Indie game of the week, I’m working on a two game article for this week! I was far too busy last week playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl (SSBB) to do much in the way of writing.

Speaking of which, my Nintendo Friend Code for SSBB is 0044-2462-1847. If you add me, let me know in the comments or in an email.

Meanwhile, in the life of Brian, things have been fairly sedate. Last week my wife left me alone for a few days, while she traveled down to her mother’s place in Texas. I spent most of the time playing games, most notably SSBB. The week was a wonderful, momentary reprieve from school as it was spring break.

<rant>

This break sort of helped crystallize my contempt for the state of my education. I’m 40 credits (34 after this semester) away from a degree in Informatics. At this point I’ve pretty much given up on that ever being considered even remotely close to a “real” computing degree. At one point it was sold to me as such. However, more and more as I take the classes and get A’s without study or having to read material, I have come to decide that, for someone like me, that it’s become a form of academic masturbation. I go to class, get taught something over the course of a semester that would have taken me a week to learn on my own. Get a decent grade. Learn nothing of consequence. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I ‘should’ be done in Christmas of 2009, assuming that they decide to teach the classes that I need to take (another sore spot) to graduate. Then I’ll finally have a degree that feels like it will be about as useful for getting a job as a philosophy degree.

So, right now I have about two years of classwork at the tune of about $10k-$14k. For a degree that I’m not convinced will be that useful (I know that any degree has a level of intrinsic usefulness), and during the interim the majority of my motivation (to work on learning things that are useful, like Ruby or Python) and free time get sucked into worrying about classes, and completing inane projects or tests.

I think the catalyst for this rant was yet another ping from friends about interest in a really cool job, but I’m stuck here so it’s not even remotely an option. Don’t misread, I’m happy at Socialtext and have no plans on going anywhere anytime soon, it’s just an example of doors being closed before I even have a chance to really consider them because of my commitment to getting this inane degree.

I’m going to keep plugging away at this for now, but man it’s really starting to wear on my nerves…. and, the 19 year old undergrads are not helping.

</rant>

I’ve started playing Warcraft a bit again. I’m not enjoying the parts that I used to. I transfered to the Blackrock server to raid with a guild that raids late night, and was at the same progression level (Read: they had killed all the same bosses) that I was at with my old guild that broke up. However, about 3 days after I transfered the guild died, and became a different guild. I’m fairly pissed off about the whole situation. I was sold a guild raiding at a certain level, and got a guild learning content I’m used to sleeping through. It’s very frustrating, and I find the only reason I play is to kill time, which is a bad sign. I’m going to try and figure something out, for the current time I’m happy with working on collecting gold so I can get my druid’s Epic Flight Form.

I have been working at ways to keep me plugged in at work, without getting distracted by the mundane distractions of working at home. I’ve found music to be a great hook into staying focused, however for it to properly mask the distractions, it has to be at a level where Jenn can no longer study. So either I sit in silence constantly distracted and getting nothing done, or Jenn hates me and gets nothing done. I have some portable Sony MDR-066s that I use when I’m out and about but they fail for serious listening as their small size make them convenient, but their sound reproduction is fairly lame. So, I decided to look into some really nice isolating headphones. I decided on some Sennheiser HD 280 Pros and I look forward to having a pair of really nice headphones that I can crank up without driving Jenn insane.

I think that I am going to start blogging once a week spotlighting some random, cool Indie Game that I’ve found. There are a lot of bad ass little games being developed by brilliant people, and the whole Indie movement has become pretty amazing with the advent of Steam, 360Live, WiiWare and PSN.

If you happen to see some cool Indie game, drop me a line and I’ll look at it, and probably write about here. Yay for small innovative games. They make me happy.

Synaesthete

Where: Download Full game Here
Cost: Free.
Play Time: Few hours.
Platform: PC

The Indie game of the week this week is Synaesthete.

At it’s core Synaesthete is a combination of rhythm button mashing and dungeon crawling with a dash of zen. The basic game play model is that you maneuver your avatar through a surreal, almost tron-esque landscape with your left hand, while pattern matching with your right hand. You need to keep the beat and pattern match along to the trance/electronica beat in order to shoot lasers at the stampede of hostile abstract creatures.

Visually, the game is awe-inspiring. Playing through this game on a big screen with the sound up was a quick way to lose myself in a sensory experience that lasted for an hour or longer. The music is great, I left a few of the songs from the levels looping for a while because they were just that catchy.

The story of the game doesn’t change much, the environment and songs become far less forgiving, and there are some very fun boss battles.

Where does the game fall a little short?

• I would say first off in the difficulty of the first two difficulty levels could use a little tweaking. The unlockable 72bpm mode is much harder and the shift in difficulty was a little annoying. It’s not impossible by any means, but I’m a fan of linear difficulty progression.
• I also think that the more complex rhythm matching at times seems overly complex and annoying. Granted, you do not need to hit every note, and in fact are encouraged not to hit every note. However, at times it feels a little unresponsive and frustrating.
• The landscapes and environment, while initially amazing and beautiful can become redundant and simple and will lose some of their visual punch, but I felt that only distracted from the experience slightly.

Do any of the minor faults in this student project detract from it’s overall class, quality or demand to be played? Not in the least. Give it a run if you can, it’s well worth your time.

Rupture is a company that runs a gaming aggregation site. I’ve been beta testing the service since it debuted, mostly because the mash-up of social software and video games makes me giddy.

The company was started by Shawn Fanning of Napster and SnoCap fame. Their first incarnation was simply a Worldof Warcraft social networking site. However, with the advent of the Armory their web 2.0 societal niche was co-opted! Never one to give up on an idea, they revamped the service, made it game agnostic and relaunched the site as less of a social network, and more of a front end for displaying all the gaming data event points in your online life.

Currently, the site is still in heavy beta, but they currently support:

• Steam Accounts
• World of Warcraft Characters
• XBL Accounts
• Halo3 Accounts

If anyone is interested in getting in on the beta, let me know. I have the hookup. I’m people who know people!

So, I’ve been avoiding games like Guitar Hero for a while, mostly because the concept looked annoying and unfun. ( See: Guitar Queer-O and Zero Puntuation: Guitar Hero III ) However, I love me some rhythm games… so I was up for trying them out.

I was out in San Fransisco last week doing the Socialtext Face-to-Face thing, and I got invited by a friend of Jenn’s to head to Sunnyvale and play some Rockband. Unfortunately, I already had plans and couldn’t go, so that was sad times.

However, I had plans to hang out with some folks in the city, and they were talking like us playing Rockband would be a requirement. So, I took some downtime to head up to the city from Palo Alto and hang out with the Rupture folks and play some Rockband, which is a bad-ass, social version of Guitar Hero.

I grabbed the bass, because if I ever had to learn an instrument it would be electric bass, and Pat got us going. I picked it up fairly quick (according to the people in the office, who are not really ones to kiss my ass) and had a lot of fun. In short order Pat conned me out of the guitar/bass and put me on drums. I picked those up pretty quick as well, and managed not to wipe us out even once, which is above par I guess? I don’t really know.

We went out to dinner and came back and played some more. All in all, I had a great time,which arguably probably had far more to do with the Rupture guys being awesome, and less about the awesomeness of Rockband.

I got home and decided that since Rockband for the Wii was only just announced, it will be a while before they release the game for a console that I don’t have to go buy. So, I picked up Guitar Hero III for the Wii, despite sound bugs. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and look forward spreading the fun around. Not that any people in town care. But still!

I’m not very good yet, but I beat it on easy 5 starring most of the songs. I’ve not been able to beat Blood Rain yet, because it’s insane. The Dragonforce song is insane in a fun way, but Blood Rain is hard in a makes-me-want-to-smash-the-controller kind of a way, which is far less ideal.

The UI of Rockband is FAR superior to that of GH3. I can’t count how many times I’ve fumbled a note glancing at the UI off to the side in GH3. Meh.

Today I went into Roberts intent on striking some sort of bargain for a D80. I’d gotten tired of waiting patiently for my dammed camera.

I’ve been waiting on D80 body, but they have been in short supply. Sounds like Nikon is hoarding them in order to repackage them with the new VR lens at some point in the future, or something. I talked with the owners and we struck a deal for D80 kit, and they bought the kit lens back for the difference between the kit price and the body only price, effectively selling me a body for the retail price. So, rock on Roberts++, I’m glad I was able to give them my business, even if it took forever.

I spent some time playing with the camera for a few hours today and upped some photos I took around the house. The weather was pretty overcast and boring, so there wasn’t much outside to test shoot. But the cats were good enough. After Jenn went to bed I figured out some more controls, and look forward to poking at things more tomorrow.

For some reason this is my favorite shot of the day:

The following are plans for this Year, I don’t know that any of them will actually succeed, but I always try.

Learning

• Finish Rails Introductory Learning.
• Create something useful, not work related in Rails.
• Learn at least some Python
• Learn how to deal with Managed Code better (svn,svk,etc)

School

• +20 Credits by the end of the year.
• 4.00 average for the year.

Hobbies

• Pick a DSLR camera and start taking pictures again.
• Beat the games that I own that I have gotten near the end of and then stopped playing.

Personal Care

• Bike once a week at minimum.
• Lose some weight.
• Start climbing again.
• Start cooking again.

Other

• Make it to Japan this year.
• Make plans to travel to Ireland (and maybe other countries) in ‘09

I’m in ur Mephisto, hackin ur pluginz

I spent several hours tonight correcting and fixing the way I was pulling a lot of data from various places like twitter, last.fm and flickr for my dynamic sidebar. A lot of the old stuff was lame javascript stuff and flash applets, and it was making the page load pretty craptastic.

I tracked down some simple plugins for twitter and last.fm that pull data from the rest apis and display it as simple text. And, I think they worked pretty good, with a little hacking. Since Mephisto is a rails app I was able to dive in and correct a few things, like the fact that the last.fm plugin caches for 24 hours, and I wanted it to display my recent tracks, as well as that the twitter plugin was way out of whack and needed some updates from when twitter phased out the relative_time from it’s API etc.

As a result of my work my page looks better (in my opinion) and the load time has dropped from ~10s to ~1s given a cache of the page. So that makes me happy.

Rails.

On the subject of rails learning, I’m moving right along. Things seem to be coming a little more naturally. I’m far from being able to realistically code something complex on my own, but little by little. I’m still working through Agile Rails Dev, albeit slower than I would have liked. I took a lot of Resting time over break.

Home work

We spent a few days tearing down Jenn’s bathroom so we could paint it quick the other day. Jenn did most of the work when it came to tearing down and painting, but I sure hand stuff to painters well!

During the tear down, we noticed that in lieu of electrical boxes (those metal boxes that you can mount switches and lights upon) they had just punched a hole in the wall and pulled an electrical line through the wall. Then they attached the fixture with some random screws into the wall (studs are for wusses), wired that shit up and called it a day.

So when we went to replace them with something that’s not ugly as sin, we were kind of SOL. as we have nothing to actually mount it to. My bathroom is even better, in Jenn’s the random hole is in the center of the wall, but in mine they punched a hole off center, and then cut a hole in the back of the fixture to jury rig that shit right up.

So painful. I’ll post pics later. We’re having a guy come give an estimate on some electrical boxes for mounting this weekend.

Camera.

So the saga of the camera continues.

I put in an order for my lenses (AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D ) last month because when I went to buy them the first time they didn’t have any. So I put in the order and asked if I needed to worry about the camera, “Oh no, we always have D80s” was the response to that. So, I ordered my lenses and I moved on, not worrying about the camera itself.

However, last week I went in since one of the lenses had come in, and found that both had been in for a week+ which kind of annoyed me, but whatever. So, I ask for a D80 (body only) (I’m after a body only because the lens that comes with the camera ( AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED is not Vibration Reduction, and so is not really worth the $300+ it tacks onto the price of the camera, IMO. The lens I ordered is VR, but it doesn’t work w/o a camera! :P) and they don’t have one. Ok, that’s fine, when will you get one? Should be Saturday. Ok, fine, I can wait 3 days or so.

Saturday comes and goes, and no camera. I call today three times (so far) trying to get an answer from someone, with no luck. And, no call back, how rude (they did call back before now)! It’s beginning to get really frustrating. It should not be this hard to give business to local merchants! :(

I totally forgot to mention that I rule and scored one of the 500 prints of the Machall Finale Strip that the guys signed. I’m going to get a real frame for it eventually, but I want to flatten it first.

Sweet.

I should finish framing and hanging my webcomic signed art. So far I have:

• Penny Arcade Poster signed by Gabe and Tycho, with artwork done by Gabe.
• Penny Arcade Poster signed by Gabe and Tycho.
• Sketch of Piro done by Fred (MegaTokyo).
• Real Life Comic Print signed by Greg.
• PvP Print (91/100) Signed by Scott K.
• Penny Arcade Laser Cell Art Dr. Raven Dark Tlon (96/750)
• Mac Hall “Leather Working” Print
• Mac Hall “Childish Things” Signed Print (491/500)

Lots of things going on, nothing of much substance, so I won’t pretend this is that interesting.

• I have a few days left to finish my Neural Network for Intro AI. It is mostly done, aside from some obnoxious behavior in the learning, but I think I have tracked down the cause.
• My AI Final Will start 12am Thursday and end at 7pm on Friday. Fun stuff.
• I think that while mildly interesting when used in conjunction to game playing and puzzle solving; I generally find AI boring and tedious most of the time, and will not be pursuing it. Just my opinion.
• This coming weekend Tim will be coming down for video games and other chicanery. I’m looking forward to a weekend of drunken relaxing and amusing gaming.
• Joe finished his last paper today, and barring some insane twist, he should be a bona fide graduate now. What a sellout.
• I will have my D80 in a week or two. It will be good times.
• I dove in to Rails and Ruby hardcore for a few days, much to the detriment of my neural network’s progress, but that’s not important. I like Ruby/Rails so far and hope to continue my learning once this stupid week is done.

In more somber news, I’ll be staying here this Christmas season because Jenn’s oldest (13+ years) cat Cleo has an overactive thyroid. This means she has to undergo a procedure in Indy next week where she’ll be injected in Radio-Iodine, and isolated for about a week in Indy. Jenn’s taking it pretty hard, but we found out today that the cancer (overactive thyroid = cancer in cats I guess?) hasn’t spread at all, so the treatment should save her. If you have any interest in this stuff you can read about what’s going on at http://radiocat.com Needless to say we aren’t going to leave while the cats in recovery, but Jenn’s mother is planning on coming to visit, so that will be cool.

My holiday plans are pretty much completely up in the air right now, as I really haven’t had the mental energy to figure out where and how available I’ll be… but I’ll figure it out next week.

Seems like seven years at UITS sort of killed my will to live learn.

I’ve been out of UITS for about four months, and it’s been one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Right now, I work at a wiki company directly interacting with clients like Symantec and SAP. I work alongside a lot of very brilliant development people who inspire. But, I’m almost at the bottom of the ladder.

I used to work in a cubicle answering the questions of John Q Student. Fixing his Linux problems, or showing him how to make the VPN work, for some reason it made me feel like I had a clue. I tricked myself into feeling like I was a programmer because I was the guy on the team who stepped up to hacking perl when the need arose.

Boy… ignorance sure is bliss. Because I sure as hell don’t feel like anything close to a programmer around the people I work with now. My grand programming feats at IU can and should be dismissed as minuscule acts hackery in the same way a web designer dismisses the childish attempts of MySpace users at dressing up their profiles.

I’m waking up to the fact that I didn’t really want to deal with… and that is that I’m fairly clueless. And while it’s understandable being that I’ve never worked with anyone on any kind of coding project, or had an official part of my job to actually code on a daily basis, that doesn’t make it any less intellectually crippling.

I’ve decided that unless I want to answer emails and do support for the rest of my life, I should wake my ass up and do something useful. I’m attaching a rapid drip of motivation to my vein and I’m going to get some shit done… or fail miserably.. but I’ll worry about that when and if it happens.

I bounced a random crazy idea off a friend of mine and he loved it. We’re going to work on developing it into Something Cool (tm), but first I need to get up to speed. I spent that last few days launching myself at ruby and rails. I read most of “Learning Ruby”, “Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby”, finished “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running” (not recommended) and I’ve started reading “Agile Dev in Rails”. I’m learning a lot, and it’s nice to have a goal… it was far too easy to put this stuff off when I didn’t have someone who knew it all essentially making fun of me while I take strides to catch my noobish self back up to speed.

Lets throw some learning at my brain and see what sticks.

Watch in High resolution on Stage6 1.618 on Stage6.
Amazing song by BT, download it for free (legit) here: 1.618.mp3.

I suck at normal updates so I’ll spew a bit.

Went up to Indy yesterday, I picked up two 15oz Bodum Pavina glasses (to match the 6 x 8oz ones I have) (Side Note: I knew those were glass, Jenn said they were Lucite and I knew that was wrong, it is borosilicate glass aka pyrex), a few nice cocktail glasses, and some replacement plates for the random nicks and accidents our dishes have gotten since the wedding. We went by a coat place and I picked up a very nice, wool long coat. I have one currently that I’ve beaten to shreds, I payed a bit more for this one, so I expect it to hold up better.

We had dinner with Tim at an alright Italian place on the north side of Indy and then headed home. It was a nice, if expensive trip.

/dev/random

• Still debating on the camera. I’m fairly confident that if I decide to get a camera it will be a Nikon D80. But I keep going back and forth on whether or not it’s a good investment or just pointless spending.
• Got Super Mario Galaxy, and it is by far the most solid, polished, and well designed 3d platformer I have ever played. Highly recommended!
• I’m using plazes now a bit, it’s nothing special, but it’s interesting.

Holiday Plans

• Thanksgiving will be here in Bloomington, hanging with friends for the holiday.
• Christmas will be in Texas (12.21 - 12.27), hanging with Jenn’s mother.

Work

• Socialtext got some Fuding and a new CEO so that’s cool.
• We also have a cool little screen cast which lets me explain what we do to other people without as much confusion.
• Work is going good, I’m getting more integrated with the people I work with, which is both good and bad, encouraging and sobering. My coworkers both inspire me, and cause longing for a stiff drink. I take the bad with the good.

After the particularly horrid Amazon Unboxed EULA I was a little hesitant to jump into Amazon’s semi new mp3 downloading service, even if the signs seemed to indicate that they had gotten it right. However, last night I decided to give it a shot.

Downloading a Song

I’d had been having a tick to listen to “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service, it’s one of those songs that makes me smile. So, hopped on amazon.com and found it in the MP3 area and tried to buy it.

I got prompted to download some software, which was kind of sketchy. I tend to avoid installing anything unless I know I need it. I guess people who are used to ITMS might like something that keeps track of their shit for them (upon further use, the downloader just facilitates downloads, it doesn’t track state across multiple downloads or organize your purchases), especially given that you only can download these songs once (I’ll get to that later). You don’t have to download it for single songs, but you do need to use it to download a full album.

So then I have to agree to a fairly benign TOU (Yes I read those things) and then I get a download of my song. Pretty simple.

Songs are 256kbs, come with all the info you could want filled in for you, even album art attached to the songs, which is nice since iTunes likes to just store the album art somewhere instead of actually saving it to the fucking file … but I digress. Let us try to get an album.

Downloading an Album

There’s and album I’ve been meaning to purchase, “Discovery” by Daft Punk. So I’ll give the installer a shot to save $4.52 off the price of my album.

Clicked to buy the album, prompted again to download the MP3 Downloader, and this time it’s not optional.

I download the installer and click through the prompts, bonus points to Amazon for using Firefox based images in their documentation instead of assuming that I’m using IE. Finish the install and instantly I’m redirected to a page and ready to buy my album, which was a little creepy, but very convenient. I go ahead and click the button to buy, and get prompted to open an *.amx file. This is the batch file the service uses to download songs via the downloader.

I open the file like it suggests, and the downloader opens and starts downloading. Which is what one would expect it to do.

The files are saved to my drive, and the downloader stayed open (Bad) but I closed it easily and it went away (Good). It added the files to iTunes automatically (Good) and keeps a copy in a local directory (Good). I copied them to another machine in my house to test their non DRM nature, and they worked without a hitch (Good!).

There is one thing that is good to mention, once you download the song/album you’re on your own as far as Amazon is concerned. (Bad) This is acceptable, as I’ve already made a few copies of my song, and can’t find any DRM or tracking. I’m happy to trade repeat downloads for the ability to keep my song where I want, play it in the player I want, and not worry about people getting pissed at me for it. Go Amazon++

Final Thoughts

This is the best option out there for downloading music that I have found. I really hope people take advantage of this channel of distribution. Downloads are quick, easy, and put in the right place. The software is unobtrusive, minimalistic, and free from ulterior motives. The one objection I have is that people with Linux as their primary OS are going to be screwed when it comes to downloading albums, as I don’t see a Linux downloader at the current time.

The need for the downloader is based on the ‘one download only’ policy that Amazon has in place. I guess downloading an album either meant some sort of automatic sequential downloading or using a single file to move the album to be processed as a batch somewhere. I personally would have just moved all purchases to a holding facility on the Amazon website and just allowed users to right download each file once at their leisure. This would have eliminated the fairly glaring problem that buying albums pose to a Linux user. However, to be fair, you can still download most if not all of the songs. You just can not take advantage of the deals on full albums which is very lame, but not unusable.

I’ll be using this service from now on, and I encourage others to do the same.

Now… can we do something about that piece of shit unboxed service so someone in their right mind would use it? kthx!

One of the very few traditional hobbies I’ve ever enjoyed has been photography.

When i was a kid, my Dad got me this crappy point and shoot Kodak camera. It was all manual with no options or features. I used the hell out of it for a long time, and took some really shitty photos. One day a friend tossed me his old Samsung zoom film camera, and I was so excited. I mean this baby had 2x ZOOM! And, sweet merciful christ, it advanced and loaded film with a motor… very high tech shit right here, let me tell you.

I took a decent amount of photography in High School, and while I loved it and kicked ass at it (well, enough to get As every semester with little work), the hassle, and materials and the general overwhelming cost of actually getting into doing real photography was enough to chase me off… Hated film, hated developing film, hated the developing chemicals. And I wasn’t even doing color prints, this was fairly painless B&W stuff.

So, I gave it up and instead picked up… well… I guess video games and staring at the internet to keep my mind busy for the next few years.

I was working at UITS and I rounded up enough spare cash to purchase a Kodak DX3900. A crappy little point and shoot camera that worked well enough. It had a lousy range, and wasn’t very flexible. But, I got a few good shots off like this, this, or this. But nothing I ever felt too impressed with… I got good feedback, and general encouragement to learn more and get better. But, my camera started limping, the battery stopped holding a charge, and the viewfinder is about 20% off center of the final photo.. so I stopped using it.

I was considering getting a new Point and Shoot like Jenn’s Canon PowerShot A710 that I’ve been borrowing, but every time I borrow it I feel frustrated. It’s like I have to fight the camera to take any real pictures. I see friends taking photos in the same settings with the same light, with amazing differences in the outcome.

I’m not saying that I don’t get a few good shots, I pulled a few decent shots out of my ass, but comparing to pictures a friend/coworker took there’s really no comparison, especially at lower light levels.

I tend to take pictures candidly with no flash, which leads to a lot of blurring and frustration for me. It’s obnoxious to take close to 200 pictures and having only like 5-10 clear enough for me to post process them at all.

So, camera envy, coupled with feeling like I wanted a non computer centric hobby lead me to start looking into getting a nicerany camera. I decided that I wanted a DSLR, because the pictures I was seeing from those cameras were just generally on a higher level. The larger sensor, combined with better ranges, lenses and features make these the only really attractive cameras to me. Plus DSLRs excel in rapid burst shooting and instant on, the prospect of a camera going from cold to ready to shoot in less than a second is very intriguing.

So I figured I’d take the easy route and just see what people on Flickr used. Flickr has a neat chart of camera usage and I took the first few camers off the list, and looked into them.

First up was the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. The XTi is Canon’s entry level DSLR camera. It’s small, uncomplicated, self cleaning, and a really decent camera. It runs about 600-700 and is a pretty popular camera. I was pretty set on getting one until I got my hands on one. I have rather big hands, and the XTi is a tiny camera. Well, it’s not that tiny, it’s just too small for me to get a comfortable grip while holding it. I have to really pinch it to keep a grip on the body. I wish my hands were smaller, but what can you do.

I took a look at the D80 that had been recommended to me by a friend, it’s a lot more expensive, breaching the 900 mark, but not quite passing into the 1k territory. The difference was apparent immediately. The D80 was larger, more solid, fit in my hand better, and had a much more usable interface. Top mounted Status LCD, a hud in the viewfinder, higher ISO/ranges.

So I’ve been leaning towards the D80, but I’m a little gun shy. On the one hand, I can afford it without that much trouble. But on the other hand it’s hard to justify getting a Camera on this level when all I’ve ever owned were shitty Point and Shooters. Plus, whenever I buy anything this expensive that’s not a computer I always worry that I’m just going to not use it either out of fear of breaking it, or out of indifference. There’s also the nagging fear that I may just suck, and I don’t want to pay 1k just to find out I suck.

Although, I guess that if I decide to get rid of it I’ll be able to get a decent price for it around town or on eBay to some journalism student or something. I also worry about whether I’m going to like the fact that it’s noisy, unlike P&S cameras, and I also worry about how much more it weighs. If I think it’s too big I fear I might just leave it home all the time.

I’ve still got a lot of reading to do, and I plan to go handle the cameras a few more times before I make a decision. But, I wanted to brain dump a little. Found a good comparison between the XTi and the D80 I need to read in detail.

Oh! Before I forget, Roberts, the camera store down on Kirkwood, is amazing. Their prices are excellent, their staff is polite and knowledgeable, and I look forward to giving them more business. LocalBusinesses++

I’ve noticed that there are a few things that I stopped doing in my life that made me very happy. I like to blame other people for the stopping, but I have no one to blame but myself for the not starting, if that makes sense.

The Stuff:

• Photography
• Video Games other than Warcaft
• Biking
• Climbing

Photography

I used to do a lot of amature photography. However, I stopped when I started to hate my piece of shit camera. I have a 5 year old Kodak 2.1 megapixel camera that eats batteries and is just bad all around. I contemplated getting a new camera but decided that the idea was not feasible due to monetary constraints.

Now a days I steal Jenn’s camera when I want to take pictures, but her camera is not really what I’m looking for… I’m looking for a camera that is a little less “turn the dial to the scene you want” and more hands on, I don’t want the camera to think for me… well a little help wouldn’t be bad, obviously, but include me on the decisions.

I would like an SLR camera, I was thinking that Jenn’s camera is a great little camera for general use, but it doesn’t seem to fare well in low level situations without a flash, and I hate having to flash all the time, it makes people edgy and I like candid shots.

Since Jenn has a nice general camera, I’m looking for a more high end deal that’s not as portable, but will produce higher quality pics. Looking at flickr, the two nice options are the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi and the Nikon D80 I’ve not spent any real time looking in to this at all… I imagine this will be a lengthy search.

I also upgraded my flickr account to Pro, I hate gallery now. Stupid slow PHP piece of crap.

Video games other than Warcraft.

Money stopped me from playing video games other than Warcraft sometime around the time I met Jenn. I don’t really blame Jenn for the whole thing, but I blame Warcraft for being such a wonderful entertainment source for the buck.

I’ve been picking up a few games to get me more up to date.

First off was Bioshock which is an art-deco steam-punk anti-Utopian FPS-RPG set in Rapture, a city at the bottom of the pacific ocean, in the 1960’s. The game is great, and I normally shun these kinds of omg-whats-lurking-around-the-corner games, but I made an exception for this wonderful narrative. I’ve not finished it yet, so a real review isn’t really something I can do yet.

Then I snagged The Orange Box a compilation of all the HL2 games, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. I’ve never played Hl2, so this was a cool opportunity to catch up on the series (yes, there is one wanker who never picked the game up, so shoot me, I was poor and uninterested as I never finished Halflife (cue further shocked gasps)) I just finished Halflife 2 and I was impressed, the gameplay while very linear shakes things up a bit and wanders between pseudo zombie horror and sci-fi gun battles. The story is compelling and the acting well done. Highly recommended if, like me, you’re stupid and never picked it up.

On to Team fortress 2, I can’t think of a time I’ve played a game like TF2 (Class based, online, territory control, FPS) that was so well balanced. Every class has a niche, and a fight between any two classes could honestly go either way, it’s quite refreshing. No more, “Oh, I’m a medic so I’m a bitch when it comes to virtually every other class” or ”oh look I’m an engineer, which means I’m a free kill to everyone who looks at me funny!”. Now I play an engineer, and I’ll fuck you up if you’re not paying attention, ph34r my level three turret! I’ve been playing an inordinate amount of TF2 over the past few weeks, and encourage people to pick it up, if you’re in to that sort of thing.

Last but certainly not least, is Portal. Portal is quite simply one of the best games I’ve played in quite some time. You should feel bad if you’re a gamer and have not traveled down this veritable physics acid trip coupled with some of the best macabre humor I’ve seen in a game. While it’s quite short (3 hours or so) and not too hard, until you start beating the ancillary challenges, it’s well worth the $20 to buy it off steam. Besides, you totally get cake at the end. Trust me.

So I’m well on my way to getting back in to video games, and it’s really nice. I hope to keep the pace up. I got a lot of games to beat.

Biking

So Biking mainly stopped because I moved in with Jenn, and we live on the top of a hill. Biking around the neighborhood is fucking obnoxious, I coast downhill for like 15 minutes, and then wear myself pumping uphill for 10 minutes trying to get home, and end up walking my bike… lame. I quickly decided I hated biking in this area. However, Jenn bought me a bike rack, and so I will take my bike to campus and I will ride it around, and it will be good. The bike is in the shop right now getting tuned, should be able to ride it once things dry up around town.

Climbing

Climbing was something I used to do fairly religiously with Joe and Anami. I stopped when Melissa started acting like I shot her puppy every time I went out to hang out with anyone for any reason. I tried a few times to get back in to the swing of things, but trying to get a regiment going without a committed partner is kind of like running around in a circle, it’s exercise, sure, but it gets old and boring after a while. I’m going to start up again with Jenn, and we’ll see how that goes. She won’t be able to go very often so I might get in touch with a friend whose in my AI class and see if we can’t start going… might be able to make a go of things.

Here’s hoping I can get these things going, I think if I can start back up these four things and keep them going I’ll be much more happy in general, and that’s always good.

For now though, I’m sick, and this entry was a monumental effort … and I’m sure it’s nonsensical. But, who cares, I’m going to bed.