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Things have picked up at work lately and it may get even busier by the time the school year starts. My boss just took a 2 week vacation. I guess I should have done the same thing. I think I’ll still go on two trips this year. I may just have to move one to the fall.

We got raises at work. Who doesn’t like raises?

I’ve been seeing a lot of people I went to high school with on facebook and MySpace. Last night I had a dream in which I was at Metrocenter Mall and people I went to high school with were everywhere. Some were calling my name to get my attention while others were throwing things at me. Some were shopping at the mall and others were working there. I wonder what it all means if it means anything.

My roommate and I played through Justice League Heroes on the Xbox. It was a lot of fun and a nice change of pace. It’s a lot like X-Men Legends except that you’re using Justice League characters and you can only use 2 characters at a time in this game. JLH doesn’t have the puzzles that you usually find in RPGs and I thought that was cool. There are times where you have to quickly entire an onscreen sequence of buttons to open doors, but that’s not too back. A lot of the time you don’t get to choose which characters you take in the battle, but that wasn’t a big deal. You can unlock more characters and alternate costumes as you progress through the game.

It’s definitely not on same level as X-Men Legends, but I still enjoyed it. I estimate that it took us about 11 hours to complete it.

I finally finished Summer of the Monkeys Wednesday night. I took a long break from it, but got back into it recently. Because of that long break from reading, my Reading List (Early 2007) has simply become my Reading List 2007. I’ve even added a few more books to the list.

The reason I chose to read Summer of the Monkeys is that I’m pretty sure it was the first novel I ever read. I had to read it for English class, and that is how I started to like reading books. It’s been somewhere around 15 years since I last read this book, and time does make a different.

It was definitely written for a younger audience. All the innocence/ignorance of the children got on my nerves a little. Of course there was usually an adult around to say something like “I don’t think that’s gonna happen”. The story takes place in the Ozarks. I got tired of reading so many country expressions. I guess that’s why I took a break from the book and had trouble motivating myself to come back to it. Once I did get back into it, the story got moving along and I managed to deal with the annoyances.

How did I celebrate finishing the novel? I baked cookies and drew designs on them. I drew the Star Trek symbol on one, drew the Heroes symbol on another, wrote “so say we all” on another, and so forth. I’ll add that to the list of my recent random impulses. And now the new book list. It’ll probably bleed over into 2008.

• Dreamcatchers, Stephen King
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card




• Summer of the Monkeys, Wilson Rawls




• The Hedge Knight, George R.R. Martin




• The Sworn Sword, George R.R. Martin
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• Timeline, Michael Crichton
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
• On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Long Walk, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
• His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
• Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
• Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
• What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy, Thom Hartmann

Update, 6/25
I accidentally left a few off the book list.

A little while ago I finished The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on the Xbox. I started on this one a couple of years ago and got a pretty good portion of it done, but of course I didn’t finish it. I had been planning on getting back to it for a while, but I was dreading it because I remember that I was stuck on 1 level in each of the 3 paths you take. Well, I managed to get past those levels even though it took me a few tries.

Overall, it’s a pretty good game though annoyingly difficult in some parts. The graphics are good and many of the actors from the movies did the voices. I don’t mind that it veered from the story. I was really annoyed by the camera angles. They made playing the game a lot more difficult than it should have been. A few times I thought the War of the Ring was going to be lost solely because of bad camera angles. Another drawback is that checkpoints are spaced way too far apart. There were a few times when I died and almost decided that it wasn’t worth going back through that section of the level over again. Like in the previous game, there are bonus levels to unlock after you beat the game. Those bonus levels are very difficult and after playing through them I am more than ready to be done with the game.

Safari for Windows…ouch! At least they are patching it.

I got bored with Titan Quest. Too much of the same old thing and not getting much out of it. It all just kind of blurred together. No use in sticking with a game I’m not enjoying just to say I completed it.

I started back reading Summer of the Monkeys. I got bored with it too. Maybe it’ll pick up. If not, I’m going back to Stephen King.

My 10-year high school reunion is the first weekend in August. I think I’m going.

I just got a sudden, strange craving for spaghetti. Time for lunch.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Westerns, but I have seen a few in my lifetime. When I was really young, I saw Shane over and over again. I put it on Netflix recently so I can watch it again. I’m sure there was a lot of stuff on TV that I just don’t remember right now. When I got older I do remember Bonanza (or was it Gunsmoke?) coming on late at night on weekends. I didn’t watch it much, but it was good for background noise. Unforgiven was really good and now I want to watch some of those old Clint Eastwood movies.

Firefly had western elements and is probably partially responsible for my current interest in Western movies and series. What have I seen lately?

Into the West is a miniseries that I believe came on TNT. It’s comprised of 6 episodes that are an hour and a half each without commercials. It covers the American expansion into the West during the 1800s. I really liked this series. I did get a little bored with some of the later episodes, but that may be because I watched them all too close together. It’s definitely worth watching, however.

Broken Trail is a two-part miniseries. It was ok, but not that great. It’s about an uncle and nephew who rescue 5 Chinese women from a life of prostitution. Maybe I just had too much other stuff going on because I kept finding my attention drifting away.

I’ve watched the first 2 seasons of Deadwood over the past couple of weeks. I had heard so many good things and wanted to see it for myself. I didn’t like it much at first, but it grew on me. It’s still not the best show, but I’m fascinated by it. It’s an HBO show and they use a lot of bad language. It’s actually kind of annoying at times. Everybody and their mother seems to use the word “cocksucker” in every other sentence. It’s an interesting show and I’m glad that I’ve taken the time to watch it. The third and last season comes out on DVD tomorrow.

Wow! I’m using Safari for Windows. Somehow it’s exciting to me. I wonder when they’ll make iCal available to us Windows users :).

I remember coming across an article last year called The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer. I can understand the points that the author makes. It’s hard for me to spend 40+ hours on a single-player game. Sometimes I don’t have a lot of time to work on it, but usually I just start to lose interest. While I’m playing a game, I’m constantly being distracted by other temptations.

Whenever I play a long game, it normally takes me months or even years to beat. I’ll play it here and there for a few weeks, move on to other games, and then start playing the original game I started again many months later. It’s not that I don’t enjoy whatever game I would have started, I just get the urge to try other games. As much as I say I’m going to work on only one game at a time that never happens. If I do spent a lot of time on a long game, I try to play a shorter game before I play another long one.

One thing that has helped me focus on a game until completing is playing co-op games with my friend John. If someone else is excited about the game, it helps motivate me to keep coming back to the game. It’s easier to block out all the other distractions if I’m hanging out with a friend. Also, it makes playing more fun. Where spending 50 hours on a solo game may seem like a lot, it only seems natural to spend 100-200 hours on a co-op game. If only they made more co-op games.

About a month ago a visitor was here and she tripped over a PS2 controller chord, pulling it to the ground. I wasn’t home, but I heard about it happening. It wasn’t until a few days later that I discovered that she knocked the PS2 down to the ground when she tripped over the chord.

The fall jammed the disc drive. After a little working, my roommate got the PS2 to play the game that was stuck in the drive (Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria), but we couldn’t get the drive open. That meant that once we finished, we wouldn’t be able to play another game on this system. This worked fine for a while. Eventually, it got to the point where we getting disc read error about once every couple of minutes. So I had to figure out what to do about my PS2 problem before we beat VP2.

I ended up sending the unit to Sony so they could fix it. They charged me $65 for this. For about twice as much, I could have bought a new one. For ~$40, Sony would have swapped it out for a refurbished PS2. Cost wasn’t the issue. I got my PS2 in December of 2000. I believe they first went on sale in October of that year. There was a shortage of PS2s at launch. When I finally got one, it was because the video game store next to where I worked decided to finally sell the units that they had set aside for those that reserved them before the launch. If I’m correct, my PS2 was part of the very first shipments that went out to stores. A lot of people that got their PS2s back then have had to replace theirs, so I was happy that I still had mine. It has sentimental value. Also, it cost a lot of money to buy back then.

I finally got my PS2 back on Thursday, a lot earlier than the estimates they were giving. Yes, they did return the game that was stuck in the drive. Everything seems fine so far.

I’ve been hearing about the Folding@Home project more lately and it has made me want to participate in it again. I think I’ve been hearing about it a lot because PS3 owners can now participate in the project and soon Xbox 360 owners may also be able to do so soon. I don’t have either one, but I still have PCs. My last work unit was completed on November 8, 2004. I remember deciding that I wanted to stop at 100 units, but my stats say that I completed 101. Maybe I did one more for good measure. Right now I have the client on my work computer, but I may install it on my desktop and/or laptop at home.