Another year has passed, and I’m now 27 years old. Because of the date of my wedding being my birthday, I’ve also been married for two years now. Neither event was that big of a deal this year with the busy life I/we lead. Jenn and I were not blessed with a week in Cali this time around (Last year we went to Disneyland for our anniversary), but rather a stressful week of study and homework.

This year my father came in to send the day with us on my birthday. We spent the day talking, and playing Wii. Dad seemed to take a shine to the Wii, and had a good time. I also spoke with my brother for an hour or so, and got a chance to catch up with my sister and my mother. Later in the evening we went out for dinner before my father left to head back.

School

School is going the same as it ever was. I’m taking summer session classes, which means that I’m cramming sixteen weeks of class into six short weeks. It’s not exactly something I’m loving. Currently I’m taking Intro to East Asian Culture, which is interesting, but not enjoyable at this speed.

With regard to my general academic progress, I’m still fairly tired of school. I’m still not convinced that it’s worth the time and potential professional sacrifices. I’m going to keep at it until there’s an avenue to the bay area open to me, but this bullshit is getting so taxing. I can’t take two more years of insipid undergrads. The other day I actually overheard some girl on her phone say: “.. and like, then I noticed that, like, I didn’t have underwear on! … I know!” /sigh

I still haven’t decided for sure what I’m planning to do, but… yea… I’m pretty done with this part of the country.

Photography

The photography is going well, I think. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback, and Jenn stopped complaining about me wasting my money on the camera a while ago. It’s annoying that I’ve not had a lot of spare time to go hunting interesting pictures, but a lot of my initiative is eaten up by school and work. I’m looking forward to going on my trip to Japan and getting a lot of good photos. I’m planning on getting a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom lens before the trip, which is a compact and versatile, albeit slow, zoom lens. Should prove useful, and with that purchase I will have officially spent more on lenses than I did on my camera.

I’m planning on trying to take a photography trip this weekend if the weather isn’t crappy, maybe I’ll get some pics at the cascades or something. Last weekend we went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, and I got some nice shots. The cats are amazing, and the trip is well worth it.

Here’s one of the cats, a really sweet white tiger that they have there:

Video Games

I’ve quit wow fairly cold turkey. It just wasn’t worth the time investment to play with a bunch of folks I didn’t know, and working on content I’ve already beaten. I felt bad about flaking out of my guild, who were about to make me a class leader and an officer, but I think it’s for the best.

I’ve taken up playing GH3 and Smash Brothers with a couple friends every week, and I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 with Tim. I wish I could play more varied games, but with my Warcraft singularity it was easy to slack off on hardware upgrades. RIght now I’m looking at about $1200 or so to get my computers to the place I want them, and I won’t have that scratch till after Japan. Once I upgrade I have a list of games I hope to play; Bioshock, C&C3, Age of Conan, Supream Commander, crysis, the list goes on and on…

I’ve also been playing a lot with Rupture, which is a kind of cross platform gaming aggregation platform thing I’ve talked about before. THey’ve made some big strides, and it’s starting to shape up really nice. They also got picked up by EA this week, so congrats to the team on that one, you guys deserve it!

Japan

As I mentioned a couple times in this post, I’m heading to Japan this summer finally! Brett (old roommate, good friend) and I are heading to Japan for two weeks in August. We’ve not set things hard in stone yet, so if you have any strong suggestions on places we should plan on making a priority (that aren’t on my Japan List ) let me know!

I’m really excited for the trip to Japan, it’s going to be the first trip I’ve made outside the country that wasn’t contained within the sterile walls of some sort of resort. We’re planning on getting train passes, and seeing a lot of varied places.

So the rest of the summer should be very taxing, but will end in a large amount of awesome. I can deal with that.

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.