Wassy was over last night, as per usual on Wednesday nights. We spend the majority of the evening just hanging out and listening to music with her taking the time to work on the piece of artwork that I had mentioned a couple posts down (which is turning out very awesomely) and I spent some quality time with Civilization Revolution and my DS.

We also watched a couple more episodes of the wonderful anime series Full Metal Alchemist. We've almost worked our way through the whole series and I'm really liking it a lot. Very good story, and pretty easy to follow for such a long complex series. I can't believe that I used to not like anime type things and now I'm pretty into it. This portion of the evening also revealed exactly how lazy we both are. She was sitting on the couch and was trying to hand me the DVD to put in the player but we couldn't reach each other. So she tried to toss it but it fell short and fell on the ground where we just kinda stared at it for a while. It was kinda funny and sad all at the same time.

And now for some general comments on Civilzation Revolution after playing it for a few days. I'm still finding it very enjoyable, however there's a few little things that cropped up. First, I wish there was a difficulty setting between Warlord and King, because on Warlord I can steamroll the computer pretty quickly and on King it's the other way around, they beat the crap out of me. That's the thing with civilization games, I like playing a challenging game, but I don't want to lose because of the amount of time that I invest in the game. It's a tricky balance...but it's still fun to have my Civilization on the go.

So this concludes todays total grab bag of random stuff. At least stuff I can talk about. There's other stuff...hopefully I can talk about it at some point, but...we'll see.

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It's civilization time! As you may or may not know I've been a HUGE fan of the Civilization series of games. The fun started back when my parents first got a CD-ROM drive for our old computer. It was back in the day...old clunky 1x external drive connected over the parallel port I believe. Anyway, it included a bunch of CD games, one of which was the original version of Civilization.

I played that thing for hours. I was totally hooked. And that continued when Civilization II came out. I loved Civ 2 just as much as I loved the first game. It was perfect. Then...civ 3 rolled around. It was good, but not up to the high standards that civ 1 and 2 set. It seemed they sacrificed gameplay for pretty graphics. Civ 4 got things back on the right track with good gameplay.

So, needless to say I was excited when I heard about the new Revolution entry. I was also a little aprehensive because it was a console version of the game. I was worried that it would be toned down too much and lose that civ feel. So it was with this mix of emotions that I purchased the game for my DS last night.

My first playthrough was kinda "eh". I was worried that I wasn't going to like it. But as I got going into my second game (they really shortened the games up) I started to get used to the new way of controling it and making things work. I'm really enjoying it. It's not going to replace my love for the PC version of Civilization, but it will do very nicely for a portable fix.

My only real issue with it at this point is you can't get a list of all of your cities so that you can select the one you want. You also can't tell one of your units to go to a specific city. But overall...things are very much the civ I know and love

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For many in the US, they're just coming off of a long weekend due to president's day. I'm one of those people. I also didn't really feel like posting running updates, so you're going to get the whole thing right now.

Saturday

This weekend was another one of those weekends where I headed over to my friends house for a lot of general hanging out and doing stuff. I had placed an order for a Gamecube controller for in store pickup at Circuit City because I needed one to play Tales of Symphonia on my Wii (very nice RPG so far). It would also be useful there because we had planned on Smash Brothers Melee and they only had one Gamecube controller. I figured that going the in store pickup route would be faster and I'd just pick it up on my way to my friends.

Well, I was wrong. The guy in front of me in line at Circuit City was trying to return some car speakers. And they wanted to exchange them for a different model, but he wasn't having any of that. This argument took at least 10-15 minutes, so had I not already paid for the controller, I would have taken one off the shelf myself and tackled a salesman so they could ring me out and been out of there faster than if I did the in store pickup. Bah.

I arrived at my friends about a half hour later than I had planned because of the Circuit City incident. Most of the afternoon was spent just watching Slayers (An anime series. A very good anime series) and general hanging-out. After dinner (pizza) we were going to go bowling, but unfortunetly, all of the lanes were booked until 8pm which was a little late for us, so we headed back to their place for some margaritas (with an awful lot of tequila) and Super Smash Brothers Melee. Followed by the now traditional late night game of Trivial Persuit which lasted about..3 hours. But it was a fun 3 hours. After that, Robot Chicken and then I dropped off at about 1am. I really suck at staying up late these days. Must be getting old.

Sunday

The next morning I went off to the gym with Wassy because Jay sleeps in late and doesn't usually get up in time to hit the gym in the morning. I really wish I had a decent gym within a close driving distance to me because it was pretty nice having all that equipment right there. But unfortunetly the only close gym is nearly 20 minutes of driving time away and I'd never go regualrly so it wouldn't be worth it for the membership.

I hung out around their place for a while longer and watched some more Slayers, then headed home. Not too much to talk about Sunday really. Just a lot of relaxing and doing not much of anything.

Monday

Monday was the day where I was supposed to get stuff done. The plan was, do laundry, get the low tire pressure light on my car to go away finally and get some homework done. The first two worked out pretty well. As it turned out, my tires were just slightly low (all 4, so it wasn't a leak or anything) and adding a pound or two fixed the problem.

The homework didn't go so well though, since the site hosted by my school where I had stashed all the work was totally dead, so I didn't really have anything to work on. So that pretty much killed my productivity for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can make it up tonight (if I have the energy to do so that is)

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This weekend was spent doing a lot of lounging around and relaxing. I spent a good majority of the time playing Tales of the Abyss, which is a really good RPG for the Playstation 2. I've had it for over a year now and only played about 12 hours of it to start with before something took me away and I'm regretting not finishing it sooner. Very good game. But it wasn't all fun and games this weekend.

I had some fish trouble, nothing major though. I noticed Saturday afternoon that my tank's temperature was inching downwards towards room temp, which is bad if you've got tropical fish and your room temperature isn't 79-80F. Needless to say, I was a little concerned. As it turns out, my heater was broke, so I grabbed my backup heater and threw it in there until I could go out the next day and pick a new one up. Luckily that seemed to work pretty well until Sunday. I also took the opportunity to redo my aeration setup, with new tubes and a valve to control flow so I don't need to use my potato chip bag clip to stop some air from going through. Probably should have gotten a smaller air pump, but...oh well. Everything seems to be working fine now, so I'm hopefully done playing in the water for a while.

Other than that, nothing else of particular note really happened this weekend (that I can remember right now anyway). Just your standard relaxation totally lazy weekend. I was going to do stuff with Wassy and Jay, but she got sick over the weekend and had to cancel. Bah to illness (and not just because I wanted to do stuff either.)

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Last night was the first night of hopefully my last semester of college classes. Nothing like a 3 hour statistics course after work to pass the time. Or something. At least the professor is an interesting guy. He's got a quirky sense of humor and knows how to make things interesting.

The first thing he said to the class was that he was annoyed at the school because they don't know how to do anything right and nobody will actually pick up the phone if you're trying to get a problem fixed. He basically went on a 5 minute mini-rant about how annoying working with the school was. It was at this point that I realized that this is my kind of teacher. He also seemed to know how to teach people too, which is kinda a rarity. Although he does also teach at Herkimer County Community College which might explain it. I've found that most of the teachers at community colleges actually know how to teach.

And as far as the big project goes, I'm beginning to wonder if my faculty advisor guy knows what he's doing at all. I'm trying to get some guidance about how the project is generally run and the guy isn't telling me anything. I have a feeling I'm just going to have to stumble through this blindly and hope for the best at the end. Fun.

Let's see here...in other non school related news, I discovered that something ate my Guitar Hero 3 saved game on my memory card, so now I need to replay the game from scratch to unlock everything again. Not that I really mind doing it, exactly, but it's just a pain to have to. I have no idea how my saved game got corrupted either as I don't recall turning the game off while it was saving or something along those lines.

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The first day back from vacation is always horrible. No exceptions. Which is why yesterday I had such a hard time concentrating at work. It was extremely hard for me to keep my mind on one task at a time which wasn't good yesterday because of the fact that I was working on something that was a little complex and I kept losing my place and having to start over from the beginning again. Sigh. I hope today is going to be better.

After work though, things went a bit better. I did my exercising while starting to watch Cowboy Bebop which has potential right now, but it's hard to tell so early into it. Then I sat down and played Xenogears, which I've come to realize again, is probably my favorite game ever. Such a cool story, and you can always pull something different out of it each time you play it. I'm about 1/3 of the way though the game (20 hours in or so) and things are just starting to get really really good.

On the school front, I was still unable to contact who I needed to contact. On my Rogues airbags front, I haven't heard anything about the parts being in. I'm probably going to call up this morning since my work phone was acting wonky for a couple days and may not have recorded the message if they left one. I'd like to have airbags at some point here.

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Yesterday I went over to my parents house in the morning and hung out there pretty much all day, playing various Wii games. We started with NBA Live 08 for the Wii (without looking at the instructions, so we were lobbing shots at the basket from the other side of the court) which was...fun. Like the reviews said, it wasn't a really great game but it was entertaining enough that it was interesting. Probably not in the ways the game designer intended though.

I managed to get my dad to play a game of Mario Party 8 which I thought was fairly good but he didn't enjoy it as much. My mom ended up winning the game. After that my parents played some tennis and I ended up falling asleep for a little while on their couch. After I woke up, we played some Wario Ware Smooth Moves which my mom really enjoyed and my dad, predictably didn't.

My grandparents (mothers side) came over for dinner and to play some Wii sports after, which was cool, and they looked like they enjoyed themselves.

But, as a result of all this activity, I'm totally Christmas-ed out. I need to take today to clean up my living room a bit, call school to get my registration for my capstone project fixed up and generally relax.

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Yesterday was the majority of the planned Christmas celebrations for my family with our gift exchange happening in the afternoon and then going over to my grandparents (mothers side) in the evening.

I got to my parents house around 11 because I had to shred some stuff and I'm too cheap to buy a shredder myself. I had cleaned my bedroom out the previous days and I had a stack of old pay stubs and stuff that I had to dispose of. That took an awful long time to shred. After that I hung out and watched the ER Christmas episode marathon on TNT until my sister and her husband arrived shortly before 1am at which time we commenced with the gift opening.

Probably the best part of the whole thing was two presents my mom gave to my dad and my sister. My sister has a habit of, lets say..using a lot of tape when wrapping gifts. Using A LOT of tape. Usually taping up every single opening in the paper that could be used to gain a foothold for the opening. She does it to one package a year, usually to my mom. So this year, my mom got revenge. She gave both my sister and my dad (for laughing at her when she's trying to open it year after year) presents that contained boxes wrapped inside of boxes inside of boxes, all taped up, with just a little note inside (although my dad got a gift certificate to the restaurant they like to eat at in his)

It was a penguin Christmas for me. My mom made me up a really nice penguin themed shower curtain and a couple of penguin themed pillows. There was also some penguin related kitchen stuff, including a really cool set of plates with penguins ice skating and on each plate, the penguins keep falling down and off the plates. I kept thinking my friends who already thing this obsession is becoming a problem are going to think I went off the deep end.

Fishy Crystal Thingy

In the non penguin department and yet still decorational department, my parents have this really cool crystal thing that rotates while shining lights up through the crystal to illuminate a 3d design inside of it that I liked when I was over there. This year they found a fish related one, which I tried to take a picture of over to the right, but it's extremely hard to do since you can't use the flash and it needs to be a little dark to get the effect.

Moving into the non decorations was a set of screwdrivers which I really needed, as well as a tool box destined to slowly empty of screwdrivers as I scatter them around my apartment never to be found again.

And then finally I got my own little in-car GPS unit because I keep borrowing my parents GPS to go places. It's a Garmin Nuvi 650 which appears to be in full working condition. I just need someplace to go with it now.

My dad got a Wii which was the result of a scheme my Mom and Myself tried to pull to keep it secret. We tried using my credit card to make the purchase, but it triggered my fraud protection after wal-mart had denied the purchase after which we used my moms credit card and it worked. Chase still called me and wanted to authorize the charges on my card though, so...it had potential to be a minor mess. It turned out all right though.

We set the Wii up and played a little bit of Wii sports before having dinner (mmm, lasagna) and heading over to my grandparents house for the traditional Christmas Eve party. As usual, the highlight for me was the traditional game of Pitch which was almost usurped by something called apples to apples, which I am assured is a fun game, but it's not Pitch. The girls team won the first two games while the boys team won the next two. After that I left the game, so I don't really know what happened in the tiebreaker match. I went back to my parents and we played a little more Wii type stuff, and then I took off to go to sleep.

Today I'm going back to my parents for some more Wii action, and the christmas cinnamon rolls of course. I should have some more pictures of the penguin stuff up later. I only took a picture of the crystal now because it was hard for me to describe properly.

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I just got back from the christmas party thrown by my dad's side of the family. As I've said before, sometimes this party can be a little...less than entertaining. Mostly due to the people there I don't really know and/or get along with. This year though, it was pretty fun. Everybody was cool, lots of good conversation and food and stuff. We walked in to the spectacle of one of the dogs (there's usually a TON of dogs at this party) wearing a reindeer costume and looking very pathetic. All the other dogs were picking on him and it kept flopping in front of his face so he couldn't really see all that well. Pretty entertaining for a bit, but they took it off him quickly.

The highlight of the event though, was Rock Band. One of my cousins (her husband actually) has Rock Band and he brought it over so we could play it at the party. We played for a couple hours, with various people rotating in and out. I managed to play all of the instruments and sing some as well. I started out at guitar and played that. I was going to play drums after that, but my sister accidently bumped the difficulty on her bass part to Expert so I swapped with her quickly.

Then I got talked into singing. I picked War Pigs as the song and apparently I knocked it out of the park because people were commenting about it for the rest of the night. It's probably because I'm known as the quiet guy who doesn't talk much. Of course, I can also sing pretty decently (if the song is in my range) so I probably ended up surprising some people. I also ended up doing vocals on Tom Sawyer and Enter Sandman.

Just a mini Rock Band review. Pretty fun game for parties. I like the way Guitar Hero handles the guitar parts more than how Rock Band does it, and I also like the feel of the Guitar Hero controller. The drums were pretty fun, but hard to get used to because of all of the stuff you had to do at once when playing them. Overall, two thumbs up, but I probably wouldn't want to pay the full price for the set unless I was going in on it with other people.

All in all, a good way to kick off the Christmas party season. It finally feels like Christmas time to me. 

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Invisible Blowing Snow

The northeast is currently in the midst of a the first real winter storm of the season. Lots of wind at the moment, blowing stuff around. Kinda normal for the area. But you would have thought the world was coming to an end yesterday.

I had to go grocery shopping and it was a madhouse. The had every cash register open and the lines to check out were still crazy long. Haven't these people ever been through a winter storm before? I was surprised that the laundry place wasn't that busy. I would have figured people would want to try to get that out of the way as well. I guess they were all grocery shopping.

I spent my last remaining day on earth (because we're all going to die in this snow storm of course) over at my friends house where we watched some Anime (more Fushigi Yugi) hung out and also played Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii. Trauma center is really cool now since it has an actual co-op mode that works really well. There's some nerve wracking surgeries in this game now and it puts the two player option to good use. The difficulty may have been a little exaggerated due to the fact we were also drinking... The skin graft operation, in particular was very, very difficult.

In any case it was a good way to unwind after my stressful week. We'll probably keep playing the game Wednesday or this weekend (between my holiday festivities)

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