World Champs!! Sunday was the victory parade. Here are all the pictures I took. I just dumped them all to picasa so there are some blurry ones but you can at least see them all.

  ¶ 10:06:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Fatality!

In honor of the Cards beating the Mets!! Every fatality from the first 4 Mortal Kombat games.  ¶ 12:59:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Go Cards! Beat the Mets! Right now the Cardinals are down 4 to 6 in New York against the Mets in the National League Championship Series. The Cards lost the first game last night too. I'm just happy their this far. It's been a rocky season or at least up and down. Backing into the playoffs with a big losing streak didn't make anyone happy. But luckily we played the Padres in the Division Series and we seem to have their number in the playoffs. Then once we get to this point it's anything goes.

Oh and why did they have to show the Cards losing in the World Series on the last episode of Lost. It was bad enough the whole thing got immortalized in the movie Fever Pitch.  ¶ 7:50:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Google buys YouTube for 1.65 billion in stock Wow. I didn't really find the sense of it when I read the rumors last week. Even now, at that price it still doesn't make much sense.

They can put ad sense throughout the whole site and make a good quarter of that money back probably. But what about google video? They have a selection of pay to watch shows, including South Park and NBA games. So are they going to go all google video style or keep them separate? Who knows.

It's starting to look like 1998 all over again. Hopefully nothing bursts this time around.

image stolen from news.com  ¶ 3:44:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Podcast, Netcast, Whatevercast The internet is pretty cool. Everything is out there. Now tv is out there.

I don't watch a lot of tv. Perhaps I do, but I don't think I do at least. I do watch a lot of sports, but outside of that, not much. But I did like the old TechTV before it was bought by G4. Then all the old TechTV shows were canceled it really left a big void in tech programming.

Lucky for me most of the people who where on TechTV now have new shows on the internet. So with iTunes I just subscribe to their feeds and watched them whenever I want. It's like Tivo's watch it when you want is built into the delivery method. It's great. Now I really do wish there was a good alternative to iTunes to get all my feeds. But right now there just doesn't seem to be anything that does it as well. I really don't understand why Microsoft doesn't build in rss feed subscriptions to Media Player. It's not going away so why not support it?

Here's a list of the video podcasts I subscibe to. I'll let you in on the audio only shows in the future.

• Diggnation - Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose wax poetic about the news of the week from digg.com This was the first show I started watching on the web.
  
• The 1UP Show - A great show with great style. It's the 1UP.com staff talking about the news of the week in games, plus a little extra touchy feely moments from the cast.
  
• Cranky Geeks - John C. Dvorak and guests pretty much moan and groan about the tech news of the week. Pretty funny and just goes to show it's not all young whipper-snappers into tech news.
  
• dl.tv - Patrick Norton and Robert Heron do another tech news of the week show. Patrick used to be on the TechTV show the Screen Savers and it's cool to see him on screen again.
  
• On The Spot - Gamespot.com's weekly gaming news show. This one is very cool because it's got a nice formal setup. They'll have game developers bring in games to demo them on the show before they're released. They do a lot of specials for the trade shows and other events.
  

Now I know I have a lot of tech shows that seem to cover the same subjects, but they all come out on different days of the week so they end up not overlapping very much. Diggnation is a Revision3 production. Rev3 has just relaunched their site with more shows and hopefully more frequent updates. Gamespot.com also has a few other shows. Button Mashing is a gaming game show. So far it's been down right goofy and not really up to snuff with On The Spot. Their tournament broadcasts are very good though. They've aired Battlefield 2, Counter-Strike Source and some other different games. Good stuff, check it out.  ¶ 9:43:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  One more thing about the 360 XNA

XNA is Microsoft's new development suite thingy. It's in C# and kind of uses a really object oriented module direction to game development. I don't know C# but I assume not much is different from C++. I haven't looked into it yet. You can get the C# Express compiler and XNA works into it all for free.

What makes it interesting is with a service fee, $99 a year, you can put the games you write on your 360. You can only trade your games that you make with other people that have the service. But it is a step into console development and that's a very cool thing.  ¶ 6:27:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  South Park meets World of Warcraft! Edit: -- Ooops! Looks like google video took down the episode. You'll have to tivo it.

Edit #2: I found a version of it Gametrailers.com

Very cool episode. They definately had help from Blizzard on this one though. There are quite a few extra animations that aren't in the game. But it was very cool to see the lip syncing and the extra hand jestures. Really makes you wish it was more like that in the game.

By the way, my WoW account is presently inactive. But if anyone wants to send me a pre-paid time card it would be greatly appreciated.  ¶ 10:25:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Hot for 360 I've never bought a console system anywhere near launch. I'm usually on board about a year after launch. By then you know generally if it's going to make it and there are a good 6 solid titles out. Granted me waiting to buy a Dreamcast or NeoGeo Pocket Color gives you an idea of if I think a system is going to last or not. That's another story.

My unofficial one year rule puts me in line to start oogling over the Xbox 360 right about now. I was very interested at the launch but at the time $400 seemed super steep for a new console purchase. Then Sony announced the PS3 launch price and it instantly felt like a "deal" to buy a 360. But that's only one part of it. The 360's Xbox Live system is really what an online experience should be. The stat tracking, the achievement points and the communication built it are really well thought out.



My other checklist to buy a system is the games. For the 360 it's, Gears of War, Lost Planet, Mass Effect, BioShock, Prey, NBA 2k7 and a couple old Xbox games I missed. Those probably include the Halo games and Fable. Three of those listed there aren't actually out yet, but are coming soon. BioShock is also coming to PC, and Prey is already out on PC, but I'm willing to bet it's going to be an easier experience just putting it the console instead of finding the right balance of settings to get it run on my laptop. I'd put Oblivion in that list too, but I already have it for PC.

Then to top it off the HD-DVD, that's an addon, makes it nice. The fact that it's optional makes it nice on the wallet. But there are rumors around that there's going to be a HD-DVD built-in bundle sometime in the future. I'm still wondering if they're going to do a pricedrop on the 360 to make it that much more attractive this holiday. The problem there is they're never going to announce a pricedrop early because it would halt sales till the price drop. Ah well. So maybe sometime after this semester is over when I'd have time to play I might be able to tell you folks more about the 360.  ¶ 3:29:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  From the Edge of ... If you look at my xfire profile over there on the right you can see I've re-installed Oblivion again. I had kept my old game saves so I just picked up where I left off. I hadn't gotten very far at all the first time around. I got it at launch but didn't play it that much. I think I was tired of getting my ass kicked.

I made a Agent class character. You can see him off to the right there. The problem is that the agent has a lot of non-combat skills in the main group. The problem with that is that in Oblivion you level per every 10 skill points you gain in your main group. So I level up but my combat skills lag behind. With the game's quests mostly deal with combat I keep getting my ass kicked. I mean I die a lot. Maybe it's because I'm only level 5 and I'm just trying quests too hard for me. I don't know. Let me know in the comments if I just suck.

I think I'm probably playing on normal difficulty. But maybe I should just crank that down to easy. Computer Gaming World(October #267) had a GreenSpeak article by Jeff Green about how most people actually play on easy. The title is "Gaming for Dummies." It's mostly a rant to the hardcore gamer telling them not to complain about games being easy or about people that play on easy. But I'm one of those guys that would think that normal was the way to go. I knew I was never good enough to go into hard mode, but felt switching to easy was a copout. Matt was always telling me I should just turn the difficulty down to enjoy the game and if I really like it I can go back and play it again. I would ignore him saying that was cheap, but maybe I'm getting old and need the easy mode now?

I think part of my problem with the game originally also had a lot to do with the elderscrolls.com forums. I'd give you a dollar if you can find anymore than 2 non-negative posts on the front page of the Oblivion section. It just seems, at least around release, that it's just full of people bashing the new changes from Morrowind. I had started reading the forum a few weeks before release to kinda get excited for it. But then after release it was all negative and I bought into it and disliked the game because of it. In hindsight though I think my unhappiness with the game is due to the class structure and the level up mechanic. Although I haven't spent a ton of time on the character, I bemoan having to make a new one, but that's probably be what I'll do. Make either a full fighter or a agent type character that has combat skills in the main skill group.  ¶ 4:32:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Football Stats Sunday So this is the first year I've done fantasy football. I've done fantasy basketball and fantasy nascar before, but never football. I'm in two leagues at nfl.com. It's the free leagues. One is with a group that I know and I they've all played for a few years. The other group is with a couple friends but then the rest are just strangers. I didn't have the best draft in either. I got decent players but I didn't sort my draft preference beforehand. We ended up going with an automated draft in both leagues, so I had actually forgotten about the draft till after it happened.

Well as it turns out in the league with the veterans I'm 3-0 and up as of right now in this week's game. But in the other public league, where I know there are a few guys that aren't even playing, I haven't won a game yet. This is despite the fact that I've been favored in every game. So much for the guru predictions. But I'm up in that game as of now as well.

Fantasy sports educates you a lot in the same way that any sports video game does. Just through osmosis you end up being able to name the 3rd string tight end for any team in the league. While I'm not quite at that level right now, ask me again around week 14. But I do remember when we were all playing NBA Live '97 and '98 non-stop back in the day I could probably name 8 of the 12 guys on every NBA roster.  ¶ 1:53:00 PM 0 comments links to this post