Post-Christmas Blues

We gorged ourselves, opened gifts from numerous clans and tucked ourselves in for the epic visit from the Fat Man himself, Santa.  And now it’s back to the same old everyday grind.  I’ve been off work for seven days now, and I don’t think there’s been a moments rest anywhere.  It’s been a long week, and only two more days to go!  Lord, have mercy!  But seriously, we had a good time, I think.  We ate great food, spent time with wonderful family and were all treated “right” by Good Ole Saint Nick. 

Tuesday night, we had my mom and Johnny over for gift exchange and a light dinner.  My mom wasn’t feeling well, unfortunately and they ended up having to leave early.  Later that night, around 12:30AM, I get a phone call.  And at our house, any phone call after 10PM can’t be good.  We ended up having to take my mom to the emergency room for a pinched nerve.  She wasn’t even able to walk, so the kind doctors refused to admit her to the hospital and instead gave her the “wonder drugs” of Percocet and Valium.  She’s still laid up in the bed today (Friday) because her doctor’s office is closed and the hospital refuses to admit her without her doctor’s approval.

Wednsday night was spent running between my mom and Jenn’s grandparents.  Jenn’s grandparents house is where the Fracker/Cole clan gathers on Christmas Eve and Day to rejoice and celebrate the giving and taking of gifts.  Christmas Eve we have a make-shift dinner (this year was homemade chili, finger sandwiches and various cookies and cakes).  Afterwards, when everyone has arrived and ate, we go down stairs to open gifts from one another amongst family, then everyone runs home.

Thursday, again between running between my mom and Jenn’s grandparents, we had the actual Christmas Luncheon.  Ham, sweet corn, scalloped potatos, homemade rolls, green beans, pinto beans, dressing, mashed potatos, cranberry sauce, brown gravy, etc, etc, etc.  Normally, after the meal, everyone would divide up into 2 groups.  Mostly the men would go downstairs to watch television or play the Wii, while mostly the women and a few of us guys would stay upstairs to play games.  This year, everyone parted ways and went about their own business. 

As for Jenn, Noah and I …  After leaving the grandparents house Wed. night, I went to check on my mom for a bit and Jenn came home to get Noah ready for bed.  They checked the Google Earth and saw Santa’s flight path.  He asked Jenn where Santa was and she said, “from the looks of it, just down the street”, to which my son screamed “I gotta get to bed!”, went to his bed and fell right to sleep … no arguments, no requests for bedtime stories, didn’t even take the time to use the potty.  Awesome.

I got home, helped do the “Santa” thing, rested for a few moments, then went to spend the night with my mom, who was by herself and unable to get out of bed.  Woke up at 5AM, came back home and crashed on my own bed waiting for Noah to get up.  He slept ‘til about 8, I guess, then we all hopped up, went to the living room and watched as he was completely frightened by the same dinosaur he had asked Santa for. 

This is the dinosaur in question.  Noah is absolutely afraid of it for some reason.  Yet, he loves the D-Rex my mom and her boyfriend got him.  I don’t understand it.  And in all honestly, Spike the Ultrasaur is the coolest piece of equipment I’ve ever seen in my life.  I’d love to have this for myself!  But, we’re taking it back for a refund so Noah can get something else he would rather have instead of keeping around a toy that scares the living crap out of him to the point of tears. 

The one thing he absolutely loves is the Dinosaur King toys Santa brought and left under the tree in his playroom.  I refer you to the Dinosaur King website, which promotes the TCG game, but there are also toys and a television cartoon.  He is addicted, and I foresee an intervention in the near future.  We’ve already laid out a schedule for his interaction with the Dinosaur King world … yes, my friends, it is that bad.

Other than my mom being sick, it’s been a nice holiday.  I do wish I could have enjoyed my time off a bit more, but, oh well.  There is always next week, when I’ll have an additional 5 days off. 

In the meantime, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas/Holiday and wish you all an awesome new year to come.

Stupidity Doesn’t Take The Holiday’s Off

Or, as MSNBC likes to call it: “Man Blowtorching Snow Sets Home On Fire.”

Comcast Doesn’t Want Me Playing WoW

Seems to be wide enough an issue that Blizzard is having to post notices on their progress.  It seems a third-party between Blizzard and Comcast is the cause of repeated disconnects from the game, and they are working to resolve the issue on all three ends.  For me: this means WoW is completely unplayable today.  I may be lucky enough to log in for 2 seconds, then I’m booted from the server.  Nice …  I hope Comcast gets their crap together soon.  I’ve got 7 more days off work … there’d better be some leveling going on at some point.

For the Alliance!

There are 4 main Horde leaders in World of Warcraft.  Thrall (Orc), Lady Sylvannas (Undead), Cairn Bloodhoof (Tauren) and Lor’themar (Blood Elf).  For the Alliance! is the Alliance version of an achievement in which players must raid each main city to kill these leaders.  As of 12/17/08, I earned my achievement, along with the reward: a black war bear. 

While it was actually pretty easy, Undercity was the most difficult because on the way back out, alot of people got stuck or lost and had to either rez, be summoned or hearth out.  Below is a few screen caps of the chaos … and chaos it was!

Thrall in Orgrimmar ^

Aftermath of Lor’themar ^

Bloodhoof going down ^

Sylvannas about to die, again … ^

It was loads of fun, barreling in to each enemy city and burrowing our way to the centers to find their bosses.  Truth is, though, it was easier than it should be since most everyone else was in Northrend leveling or experiencing the new content.  And the warbear is a nice gift from King Wrynn, but sadly just a re-skin of the other bear mounts you see in-game.

If Charles Shultz were Japanese

 

Chris McElroy, “There Ain’t No Blues At Christmas”

Great performance by a guy I can say I know.  Well, use to know.  We attended the same schools together since 4th grade, but didn’t associate after middle school.  He’s a very good performer, check out his work.

The Band’s MySpace Page for more music videos and songs.

Video from Digital Cafe Tour, on YouTube

Playstation*Home First Impressions

Playstation Home was released for public beta last week, and I finally was able to download it this past Monday.  Why did I take so long?  Because it seemed to take magic for it to appear on my PSNetwork media blade.  By the time Monday got here and there was still no sign of the Home icon, I logged onto the PS3 web browser and visited the PS3 blog.  There I clicked on a link of news saying, “Playstation Home is now live!”  The blog post said that I could restart my system NOW and the Home option would now be available.  Sure enough, after several days of waiting, it turns out that by reading a blog post, it magically appeared for me.  I assure you, it wasn’t simply overlooked, it’s kind of hard to miss, and I’m very picky about each of my XMB’s being positioned at the very top option.

The download … or should I say the initial download of the game was only 77MB and downloaded rather quickly compared to other PS3 downloads.  The install was a breeze … also the fastest of anything I’ve had to wait on before.  But as you might already know, there’s probably a reason for this.  It seems the basic 77MB download is only one tiny chunk of the game.  Graphically, it seems to be your house, character creation screen with feature customization and a very limited pallete of items, and tutorials/controls/setup items. 

I’m not sure if each house is the same for everyone, but I received a nice balcony view of a beach-front property.  The stock items that come with the house are a couch,  some chairs, 2 tables, two “storage” tables and a lamp.  You can rearrange, add more of the same or take some away and put back in your inventory.  There’s not really much to do in your home, except sit and look out off your balcony. 

Want to travel to the Mall, Theater or the Plaza?  Well, que it up and … wait … that’ll be another 23-32 or more MB download of content per location.  You only have to download it once, and you can select to do a “background” download.  It’s fairly quick too, but still … that’s more space being quickly consumed on your hard drive.  No wonder the PS3 was released with such a large drive!  Now it all makes since! 

The theater was crowded with people dancing, talking and carrying on while a movie preview of “Twilight” played and then a music video.  Half the time I was there I was waiting on the content to load, and from what other folks were saying, this is pretty much all that plays all day and night, repeatedly.

The plaza is … a nice place to sit and talk.

The Mall offers a few shops in which you can buy new content.  Oh, and when I say “buy,” I really mean, “buy,” as in pay cash for.  To purchase a digital image of a model fighter jet for your house costs $0.49-cents.  As does new clothing (a simple cowboy hat = .49-cents) and so on.  The choice of decorations is very limited, but, of course, this is a Beta, so take everything I’ve said thus far with a grain of salt.

There is also a bowling alley, where you can play pool, arcade games and … bowl.  Very social type stuff going on in here.

Over all I suppose the biggest description of Playstation*Home would be: DISAPPOINTING.  The game is edited heavily to maintain a friendly rating with kids and adults.  Words deemed inappropriate, including hand-typed “hello’s” come out as “****o” because the first four letters also spell “hell” and we can’t have that!  It’s a good thing Sony went ahead and released this Beta, as there is still alot of work ahead of them to make it ready for official release.  I can also see why they haven’t wanted to release it yet also.  On the bright side, I’m glad it’s free because I sure wouldn’t pay for something like this. 

Rockband Goes Country … Finally …

Major Nelson announced the latest tracks to hit Live! for the Rockband crowd.  This time around, we finally get a little country lovin’ with five popular tunes.

“Mud on the Tires,” by Brad Paisley

“Gunpowder & Lead” by Miranda Lambert

“Hillbilly Deluxe” by Brooks & Dunn

“Sin Wagon” by The Dixie Chicks

and “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)” by Dierks Bentley

A Brief First Impression of Playstation Home

Wierdest darn thing I’ve ever seen …

I got tired of waiting for my system to update with Playstation*Home, so I signed into the PS3 internet browser and went to the PS3 Blog … At the bottom, where headlines flash by, I clicked on the one that says, "Home now available!" It took me to a blogpost about how I could … at this very minute … after reading the blogpost … restart my system and Home would be available in the PSNetwork blade of the menu.

Sure enough … It was necessary, this whole time, to visit the blog first?! Wth?

Well, 77MB later and a super fast install, I was ready to go!

So I downladed Home, created my character with the very, very, VERY limited items available and entered my Home … Very bland and uninteresting. Graphics-wise, beautiful … but boring. I can pick up and move furniture, rearrange my house, put stuff in and take stuff out (chairs, tables, a lamp and a footstool to start with, that’s all you get.) Oh, and you can change to 8 preset wallpapers. I’m not sure if each house is unique or they’re all corner balcony views of the ocean …

I went to visit another section of the community, ala Second Life but much easier to navigate. I went to the Mall, which required a wait time while an additional 32MB of data was downloaded. I’m assuming that each section requires additional downloads and the 77MB is simply your house and the character creator as well as interface … Lotta people walking around not knowing what the heck to do. I walked into a store to see about buying some furniture for my bland house. I click on decorations and wait about a minute for it to load the first time. There is 1 decoration available for download … a model fighter jet you can set on a table … I go to buy it and realize … wait a minute … this piece of digital property costs .49-cents! Yup, to put an image of a model fighter jet in my house, I have to pay Sony .49-cents. So I back out of that meny quickly and move on.
No other stores were open and the only video playing was Veronica Belmont and some other woman advertising Quore. There were a few advertisement boards scattered about for the new PS3 keypad. Other than that, I was bored and ready for bed. Tonight, I may check out the movie theater, lord knows how big a download I’ll have to wait for on that one …

Over all, as far as first impressions go … I’m disappointed, let down and disgruntled. This is the savior of the PS3? Hmm … Maybe Microsoft’s treatment of Silver players isn’t so bad after all … they do go for content over lavish looks, for the most part.

My Weekend Update for Dec. 8, 2008

Saturday was a busy day for me.  Usually I spend my Saturday mostly holded-up in the house and enjoying the peace and quiet that only being alone can bring.  Instead, we slept in late (about 10-ish) and then hung around the house ‘til about 1PM.  After getting cleaned up and dressed, we headed out to search for some “Dinosaur King” cards for Noah. 

Dinosaur King is a kids show on the CW (4kidstv) that comes on Saturday’s.  It’s basically a dinosaur version of Pokemon, as it involves these two teams of characters battling one another with dinosaurs.  Anyways, the actual products are V E R Y H A R D to find.  In fact, the cards are nowhere to be found around here.  We did manage to find a dvd of the first few episodes at Barnes & Nobles, which is going to cost us $15 to have it ordered and shipped to the store.  The cards and toys, however, can only be found on eBay, as far as I can tell, and most of them are imported from Japan. 

Anyways, we visited Toys R Us, Target and had dinner at Steak n’ Shake (which was free because we went about 10 minutes without even being offered a drink after being seated.  This was my wife’s doing as she is a bit tempermental when it comes to being waited on!  I was okay with it, as with Steak n’ Shake, you’re going to be waiting awhile anyways.  That’s just how they roll.  Oh, and on a side note, I visited a hardcore comic book store to search for those cards I was talking about … awesome place that I could easily blow a few thousand dollars in …  I believe it was called “Great Adventures,” in Murfreesboro on Thompson Lane, near the OnTarget shooting range.

Sunday, I won 3 eBay auctions for the pvc “Dinosaur King” toys I found on there.  “Straight from New York, imported from Japan!”  I went grocery shopping and hung the last strand of Christmas lights we needed for the house, condensed the extension cords and plugged everything up.  Looks nice, but nothing fancy this year.  Maybe next!  I also had some “bush lights” that are net-like lights you drap across your shrubs.  Unfortunately, our shrubs are now sticks … so I didn’t put those up.  I also leveled my hunter in World of Warcraft to 80 and bought about 1,300 gold worth of crap that I didn’t need, breaking my toon and sending me off in search of more money.

Today, I went to Logans for lunch to grab a to-go order and ended up writing a note on my ticket explaining why I didn’t leave a tip.  Hope that wasn’t too rude of me, but after waiting for 20 minutes (not to mention the 20 they said it would take when we called to get the order ready) they handed me the bag that had been sitting on the counter since I went in and had a seat.  All this after telling me it was being gotten together.  So I politely drew a line thru the tip section and left a note that said: “No tip because I had to wait too long on an order that was already bagged and sitting on the bar since I arrived.”  Then I grabbed my bag and ran like hell.

Now, I’m waiting …

Tomorrow I go for the orientation for a new job I’m starting.  It’s not a new-NEW job, but it’s a second job I plan on trying to keep for a few months, anyways.  Things are slow at my current job and we’re not getting a full 40 hours each week.  Not to mention the 2 weeks we’re hardly going to be working …  So posts and online time are going to be at a minimum for the next few months.  I hope to see y’all on the other side!  Wish me luck.