I have been in Panera Bread for some 4 and-a-half odd hours, for predominantly one reason: yesterday I went and bought my first Mac. Well, ok, in actuality a buddy of mine bought it for me using his student discount and I have to give him a check on Tuesday. It was a classic geek-adventure story, and that's what I'm going to relate today, rather than jump directly into what I like and do not like about my first Apple computing product.

It is a well known fact that I like to make purchases of new mobile gear right before I go on travel. Having the opportunity to immediately put a gadget to use and prove it in the field usually solidifies my tendency to use it. The stuff I've bought in travel dead zones typically wind up on a shelf permanently stuffed in their carrying case. The problem this creates is that it is also not unusual for my travel plans to get knee jerked and for me to wind up on a plane, train, or automobile some number of days earlier than I had planned. This means I have less time to put in an order and get the material shipped to me before I depart. So was the case with my second attempt to get an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) this year. Last time I was just about to put an order in and I got pulled for 2 weeks of travel out to the west coast. This time I had planned on departing Sunday of next week and I got yanked to depart no later than Wednesday. I was just too antsy to try and put in an order and believe it would get to me by Tuesday and have no slow-downs caused by the Memorial Day Holiday.

After 6 hours of online research Thursday night, I did find one vendor that had Saturday delivery as an option for shipping choices. I placed my order for a Samsung Q1b about 1 o'clock in the morning, and sent an email with instructions to please give me a call and at any rate to not process the order unless they were absolutely certain they could deliver by Saturday. I told them I had paid the [rather exorbitant] fee for Saturday delivery, and that I was departing on travel and would only be available Saturday to receive the package. i also told them I had attempted this with Dynamism, who had charged me for my order and the rush delivery, and then knowingly failed to ship the UMPC that Friday. It took weeks for me to get the refund processed.

PCUniverse phone lines were open at 8am. I gave them the first hour to get through the emails and evening orders. No phone call. I called at 10am and asked about my order and were they going to be able to fill it and ship it. They stock checked the Q1, even though I knew that they had 230 units in stock. The salesman placed me on hold, and told me he was IM'ing with the stock floor. He came back in a reasonable amount of time and told me that they had just filled the order and I should get it tomorrow. I started checking my bank account to see when the charge was levied. It took about 2 hours for my confidence to be buoyed by seeing a transaction against my account.

I started checking the site for an update to the status of my order, or if the real-time inventory decremented by one. Two hours later my order status had been updated to "Awaiting Customer Response". WTF?!! I let things go for another 30 minutes, to see of I would get a phone call or see an email come in. After not seeing or hearing anything that I would be responding to, I called in. They told me that my address verification had failed. Knowing that I would have to execute one of my contingency plans, I was loathe to fire up at them and ask why they had charged my credit card first, and then done the address verification. Idiots. The address verification failure was a tune I had heard before, typically from podunk vendors on antiquated systems, as I am able to order from Amazon, GameStop, Barnes and Noble, Newegg, TigerDirect...you get the point. Usually when this happens, I tell them to call the bank, since they do not always do this on their own. When I went through this with Dynamism, I, for the umpteenth time, called the bank myself to confirm that my address data was up to date. After calling Dynamism back and telling them that the problem was them, and not my bank, they "miraculously" were able to successfully process the order.

So, this time around, I was not going to have these guys monkey around for 3 hours just to ship the thing late. I immediately told them to cancel the order and reverse the charge on my credit card. I also hopped online and lodged a dispute against the vendor, just to have the case on record.

So the backup plan had been to get a MacBook, although, too, was a plan with its own potential roadblocks. First of all, ordering from the Apple Store was a non-starter, as ship-out time frames are 5-7 days for refurbished units, and even longer for new ones. My buddy, who is a long-time dedicated Mac-user, had been offering to use his student discount to allow me to get one for $100 less than retail. We had called the university bookstore the day before, but the only MacBooks they had were equipped with 80GB Hard drives. With 30GB of iTunes music, I had decided that the 120GB version was the minimum. However, overnight the 80GB models without a Superdrive dropped to $999 with a student discount. On Thursday, when we called, he only had one unit in the store, with no certainty on when the re-stock order would come in. I was concerned with both possible outcomes: that the store would be completely out, and that even if I did buy the available system, I would be disappointed about settling. But with three weeks of life on the road in my immediate future, a new toy had become a requirement.

I should also add that I had attempted to find a Samsung Q1 at retail. No Best Buy in the state of Virginia had one. Same story for Circuit City and CompUSA. I had 2nd-tier contingency plans that if I could not find something locally, that I would buy something at one of the Virginia stores I would be passing through during the first leg of the upcoming trip. However, with nothing on my plate for the 3-day weekend than making up all of the work I was now behind on due to having to prep for this trip early, I really wanted the new item to play with in the free spaces between working.

When we called the university store, they had sold the $999 unit, which had actually been quoted to us at $1099 the day before. In its place were 8 new systems for $1159. The canceled order for the Samsung Q1 had amounted to $1044, and even though at the outset I had established a maximum budget for this purchase of $1300, I was beginning to grate at the concept of paying out more than the amount of the canceled order; it had become my new comfort zone. Partially because I was telling myself I had "saved" $156 out of what I had originally budgeted to spend.

The new systems differed by $60 form the one-day previous quoted price because they had the superdrive (DVD+/-RW DL). The $1099 one only had the combo drive (DVD/CD-RW). My MacBook requirements included the 120GB HD, the superdrive, and 1GB of memory. I was willing to compromise to a certain extent on some of those; there were mitigating plans. My current work tabletPC only has an 80GB drive, and was my primary iTunes machine. With 30GB taken up by iTunes and an external drive, I still had enough room. Burning CDs should have been enough in most situations, and I could move data or files to be burned to a shared drive that a WindowsPC with a DVD burner could access, or share the Wintel machine's burner out for the MacBook to use. I could purchase memory second-hand and install it myself, which is what I have traditionally done with Windows laptops.

Since the weekend desire had vaulted to the fore, I was planning on moving to another backup idea I had, which was to drive over the Apple store in Richmond and buy one there. But at $1299 retail for the model that met my requirements, I was definitely going to have to settle for the base model, compromising on HD space and the optical drive. My buddy, a stalwart techie wingman if there ever was one, offered to make the drive with me with the aforementioned student ID if I wanted to leave right then, since he was heading out of town later that night. Road trip on a Friday afternoon for the express purpose of buying new tech? 4 hours of doughnut holes and Vitamin water and swapping stories. OK, I was in.

On the ride over I needed to do two things to feel comfortable about pulling the MacBook trigger. I wanted to stop at a BestBuy, just to see if they had anything comparable in a Windows PC that was in the same price range. I also wanted to mull over whether I really wanted the $1299 unit (which would be $1199 plus tax with the student discount). I was also concerned because I was completely out of the MacBook Black running, which had been my originally desired system. Ironically, my buddy, who is not going on travel any time soon, and was originally targetting a white MacBook, snagged a refurbished black one off the Apple store earlier this week.

BestBuy didn't have anything. While there were a couple of systems in the same spec and price range (actually there was only one that was $1199..the rest were more), none of them had any features striking enough to warrant a premature upgrade form one of my other Windows laptops. So, off to the Apple store we went.

Now, being in an Apple store can be an experience in and off itself. The nearest PC retail experience to it is going to a Fry's Electronics, which matches an Apple Store's ****with sheer volume and depth of products. I could write an entire article on our two hours in the store, but that will come later as part of this series.

Before making the final buy-or-bust decision, we asked if they had any of the superseded model (models which were only "superseded" by about a day, maybe two) in the store. The answer, truthful or not, was no. They had shipped superseded models back the same day the new ones came in, I would reckon to be sold via the website at discounted prices. All that was left was for me to decide to pay roughly the same money for the base MacBook that I was due back for the canceled Samsung Q1, or jump $200 more for the a better compromise. A compromise because although spec'd to my requirements, it was still not black.

Again, my bud and I discussed mitigating options. On the ride over, I had decided that I was getting rid of Laptop Two, which has traditionally been the fourth PC on my network; a cheap backup unit intended to be used for travel, maintenance and diagnostics for house calls, act as a game server, and pull a few multimedia duties as well. At the time, it was filled by a Toshiba Satellite, the second Toshiba Satellite in a row that had filled that slot. This now meant that if I went cheap on a MacBook, I could cannibalize parts from the Tosh, including the 120GB HD that it had and a 1GB memory stick out of its 1.5GB of RAM. The downsides to this plan were that I was not a fan of personally doing fresh OS installs on laptops; they have seemed harder to work out the kinks on than a desktop, and have little bits and pieces of hardware (like the touchpad), that take more time to track down if they are causing a problem, or if you just want to disable them. Also, since the new MacBooks are on a dual memory bus like most desktops these days (meaning that if you have memory chips of the same type, size, and speed, you can move data on the up and down swing of a clock cycle, effectively doubling your data transfer rate), they come equipped with 2 x 512MB memory chips; adding the 1GB chip from the Tosh would bump my overall memory to 1.5GB, but would lose the dual-channel effect. Not a big hit, trading memory size for channel speed, but just not optimal. And there would be nothing I could do in the immediate future about the optical drive, although 3rd party drives for cheap are available, it was not something I was going to get done before I had to get on the road.

So, the HD and memory upgrades were not optimal solutions. While I had mentioned that I could probably get by without a DVD burner, there were still possible knots. I had no idea how successful I would be getting my MacBook onto the home network, or getting it to access various network hard drives. And I have been on trips where the need to burn more than 700MB of data to an optical medium has come up. I was also hesitant about expending over a grand for a product that I might wind up feeling like I had settled for. The issue of the more expensive unit not being black is something I would really get over, as long as the system performed like I wanted it to. At the end, I decided that I did not want to have driven 3 hours to get there and back, and walk away with something that I would immediately need to break into (thereby voiding the warranty) and provide some do-it-yourself upgrades. I had budgeted $1300, and I would still come in $50 under the original target. It didn't help that my buddy's unit was spec'd like the one I wanted; a constant reminder that mine would be marginal if I went with the cheaper system.

And, hence, we walked out of the store with the [currently] mid-tier MacBook: 2.16GHz Pentium Core 2 Duo, 120GB Hard Drive, 1GB of DDR2 667MHz Memory, Superdrive, 2 x USB 2.0 Ports, 13.3" 1280x800 resolution glossy finish LCD, Intel GMA 950 64MB Shared Graphics, iSight Camera, mini DVI Port, Gigabit Ethernet Port, 802.11b/g/n Wireless Antenna, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, 1 x Firewire 400 Port.

So, I have a lot more to tell. If you are wondering whether or not I like it, and hate the idea that its going to take me weeks to finally doing a write-up, I just leave you with the fact that I walked into Panera Bread at 2pm. It's not 9 minutes until 8pm, and after first putting three hours of work, I am just putting the finishing touches on the blog entry. More to follow.

OK, I took off from work yesterday afternoon to see Spiderman 3...a perfectly justifiable reason for an afternoon out of the office. Besides , I needed the downtime after the two week install trip out to Bellingham, WA. I will warn you that the remainder of this post contains an entirety of spoilers. If you want to view the movie from a fresh perspective, move on!!!

So, the movie was mediocre, and scores a 4 out of 10. It was not the travesty that X-Men 3 was. You will be entertained when you go see it, but by the end of the movie, I was disappointed.

My brother and I view cartoon or comic movie adaptations through very different perspectives...usually. He tends to feel that any deviation from the original storyline is an error on the creator's part. I usually try to view the movie completely detached from the original story. I think that there are some necessary deviations that have to be made. Sci-fi/fantasy flicks always have to hoe the tough road of being dedicated to the original to not tee off the geek hordes, but must make the movie accessible enough to new consumers to capture a large enough viewer audience to make a significant enough profit. I also think that where the villains are concerned, the conflict between them and the protaganist must be personal. Let me explain:

In comics it is totally accepted that frequent villain origins are not required to be overly fleshed out. A new villain can just be exposed to a freak accident involving radiation or a random mix of chemicals, or can be overlooked when the hero is rescuing some group of innocents from some major catastrophe and then want revenge. There does not have to be some familial link going back five generations or old teammates that find themselves on different sides of the law, and so on.

In the movies, I think creators want the conflict to be more binding in order to ensure some level of emotional involvement between the two enemies. The greatest villains are the ones that you really dislike to the point of wanting the hero to go over the edge; maybe it's ok that the hero not become judge, jury, and executioner, but you definitely want there to be a little taste of vengeance in the final fight; it's gotta be about more than just bringing the guy to justice.

So those are my basic tenets. However, there is a point at which you have strayed too far from the original content that even I get perturbed.

The first problem with S3 is that there is just entirely too much going on. This is a kitchen sink movie. Despite the fact that Sam Raimi has stated that they are not locked into the traditional trilogy format for the series, that 4th and 5th movies were possible, it seems like the unlikelihood of Toby Maguire's return to don the blue-and-red suit is confirmed by the apparent attempt to include every fan-favorite storyline from the comic into this movie. Any 1 or two of the storyline's could have been a movie by itself. X-Men 3 and Batman Forever tried to do the same thing, and every time movie-makers do this, some character gets marganilized, and it is totally unecessary.

In the comic, Parker dates Gwen Stacy before marrying Mary Jane Watson, and her death is one of the two major guiding tragedies in his future stories. She is installed in the movie as a mere strain mechanism for Peter and MJ.

Sandman is one of Spidey's most interwoven and at times viscious enemies. His story is near epic, if only in terms of its sheer length and endurance. His story has gone on for 43 years. In the movie implementation, the story of Spiderman's origin is convoluted and in many ways is lessened in its value by the realization that Flint Marko was actually Ben Parker's murderer. By the end of the movie, it is portrayed as an accident in which Ben's murder was never intentional.

In the comic, Harry Osborne's death is due to his own thrist for revenge. While his final act before dying is to save people he loves, it is a much longer road getting there, and the actions that bring him there are brought about by his own thrist for revenge on Parker. It is hardly the heroic, buddy movie ending that is shown in the movie. Additionally, the psychosis that plagues him is a great story in the twisting of human nature, and this aspect is completely glossed over in the movie.

One of the favorite sotrylines in the comic was Spidey gaining the black suit, which is a much different design than the way it is protrayed in the movie. In the film it's just a pallette swap from the blue-and-red design. In the comic, the suit is a principle device used to inject some freshness into the story. The ensuing storyline of twisted vengeance and the triangle between Brock/Venom,Parker, and the symbiote is run over in the movie. The fact that the symbiote is intelligent is removed. The fact that, via its original attachment to Spiderman, it can negate the preceptory function of Parker's "spider-sense" when grafted to Brock is never explained. All you see in the movie is that Venom is consistently able to sucker-punch Parker, which an uninformed viewer would normally think should not be possible.

Any one of these stories could have been a movie on its own. A good movie would have been a part of the Sandman saga, or the Venom saga, and the personal storyline of Peter dating Gwen and his estrangment from MJ. If they were looking for a 4th movie, they could have ended it with Peter still estranged from MJ. As it is, it is apparent that the studio figured that a 4th movie was not going to happen, so they chucked the kitchen sink of storylines into this one movie, making for an unfocused, kaleidoscope of muddled scenes that leaves the viewer feeling like nothing epic has really occurred. None of these villains really feel like they are a serious threat to Parker's life, unlike the Green Goblin and Doc Ock. Nothing they do really make you say "Whoa!" We are expected to feel sympathetic for the Sandman, when his original character is a total criminal, not somebody who is "not a bad man, [I just] had bad luck". Also, the movie script removes the key Spidey quips, which seems to empty the character out from Toby's previous performances. Throughout the whole movie, Maguire just doesn't seem like he's as much into this performance as he was in the first two. Could it have been the crappy script and storyline?

So the good: Topher Grace's line delivery, which is very similar to his Eric Foreman character from "That 70s Show" brings some comic relief to the movie, at least for the first half. The technology and CG sequences are pretty smooth, unlike most movies, the switch from a live action actor and a CG model appeared pretty seamless, at least on the big screen and during the first viewing. In every movie I've seen before, you can always see the transition from man to clay-like CG model. And there is something undeniably fun and hilarious about pumpkin bombs.

I'm trying to think of something to say about more positive aspects of the movie, but I can't think of any. Maybe when the DVD comes out, and after an additional viewing, I'll see it in a more positive light. Why am I getting the DVD when I didn't really like the movie? I'm a collector...I've got the first two...you gotta buy the third. Those are the Seinfled rules of life.

My cubemate and I were having a conversation today about reserve tanks on motorcycles. I told him that it wasn't the reserve tank that bothered me, it was the fact that most bikes without a reserve tank do not have a low-fuel indicator light; you just start to hear the engine choking. I went on to mention it was probably an issue for me because my first two motorcycles did not have reserve tanks and had low-fuel indicator lights, so when my third bike operated on a reserve tank, it was a good bit bothersome.

My point was that with guys, at least, and our hobbies, particularly ones requiring a specific skill-set, we tend to be permanently acclimated to whatever environment we initially trained in. I started diving in cold water, so it doesn't bother me as much. Ditto for riding motorcycles in cold weather...I'm willing to ride (within the city, not the highway) down to 18 degrees...because those were the conditions when I was first learning to ride.

At the time, I did not think that there was any correlation to the digital aspects of my life**** In another conversation earlier today, a buddy stopped by to tell me how much he was looking forward to Blue Dragon. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had just never understood westerners who liked Japanese ****RPG's.

I though about it a little later tonight. Manga, anime, and artforms in that vein seem to be far and away from Tolkien-based fantasy. As a kid, I fell in with the D&D crowd...a bad influence to be sure. Most fans believe that the D&D world is firmly generated from and rooted in the writings of Tolkien, a Brit by birth, as the basis for their central themes. It was the environment that I was first exposed to when I was really being introduced to gaming. I think that "comfort zone" has pervaded into my adult years, and the **** that I tend toward when deciding what to get into.

Even now, I'm trying to play through Zelda for the Wii and it is a trudge. I reckon that there are some good, perhaps even great titles out there, but I just do not think I'll ever walk those paths. I've never played one Final Fantasy Title. If Square Enix imploded and took other developers of that ****of RPG with them, it would not make any difference to me, or my take on the market.

I guess this trend of mine is somehwhat dichotomous, since I am a huge fan of Asian history, the concepts of Bushido and Zen, and many other aspects of Asian, and specifically Oriental, culture. But when it comes to the games that they play, I just don't get it.

I've had my Blackberry 8700c for about 15 months now. Cingular has an upgrade model out now, the 8800. The phone functionally does nothing more than the 8700c...it's just slimmer, and I would be the first kid on my block to have one. I said I would keep this phone for two years, to finally take advantage of the discount you are supposed to get for a phone upgrade at the 2 year point. What is really killing me about making the decision is that I do not have any choices, and that is what is driving me nuts.

 I can not have a camera phone within my work building, just as I can't at probably well over half of the facilities I have to go into to work at when I'm on travel. This eliminates every phone carried by Cingular that uses the Windows Mobile OS, which would be my preferred choice if there was one available. As far as I can tell, it eliminates almost every Windows Mobile device on the market, as well as the Treo. The Palm OS device would be my fallback if that was a viable option.

 What I do not understand is the huge chunk of market that cell phone manufacturers are cutting themselves out of by not offering a competitor to the Blackberry that does not have a camera. Almost all US Department of Defense facilities, organizations, and contractors have some restriction to camera enabled devices. There is a reason why the Blackberry is the Smart Phone of choice for the US Government. While I've become accustomed to the Blackberry interface and design, it would certainly not be the device I would carry with me if there was a Windows Mobile or Palm OS device I could take into my work offices. I have felt like this particular technology has been foisted upon me, although it is me that insists on having a device that can both receive and transmit full email with a full QWERTY keyboard. 

The only option to a Blackberry right now, based on the camera restriction, are the Nokia smartphones. However, I have not liked the feel of the keyboard, the 9000-series Nokia's are not available in the US, or at least not at Cingular, and the one I did try out did not have a comfortable feel to the keyboard. Add to that my lack of familiarity and reservations on moving to the Symbian OS that the Nokia phones use.

 So, for the time being, I have elected to hold off on the upgrade of my 8700c, despite the fact that it has taken a beating over the last 15 months of travel. Over the next 7 or 8 months before I plan on actually doing an upgrade, I'll be keeping a closer eye on the market and examining what options are out there for my business smartphone. I really hope that in that time, Microsoft and their smartphone manufacturing partners, and Palm, as well, have epiphanies that lead them to make some option devices without cameras. 

So I made a blog entry at the first of the year...and none since then. I've done a lot of flip-flopping on where I am on this whole hobby...gaming, computer technology, mobile tech, etc. I've said that I was going to get away from it...I've said that I was just going to play console games...anyway, enough of that soul-searching and BS..I'm coming back. After two weeks out here in Washington and some time in my hotel room after work hours to catch up on my technology reading, I have a serious jones to get back into the tech world. I brought my Nintendo DS Lite Onyx with me but have not fired it up. I've watched a ton of movies (Flags of our Fathers, Flyboys, Gridiron Gang, The Guardian, Invincible, M:I3, Fearless, Employee of the Month, and Smokin' Aces), and while I'm caught up on my movie jones, my gaming and technology jones are piqueing.

 I roved around on Newegg.com last night and reconstituted wishlists for my intended computer upgrades for the year. In addition to internals, I'm also going to just go ahead and upgrade or changeout the tabletop stuff that irks me because it's what I'm always looking at. The Main Tower needs a 22" widescreen, HDCP capable monitor with a quick response rate; the current model is a 19" standard ratio screen that I got tricked on with the quoted response rate of 12ms, which it turns out is actually the time to gray, not from black all the way to white, so the actual response time is 24ms...unacceptable. It also needs a new mouse because the current Razer mouse is too low profile to be comfortable for prolonged use, and has no side-mounted keys. I also want to put 2.0 speakers on all of the systems to keep the neighbors from complaining about all of the subwoofers in the computer room. The backup tower needs a new keyboard (the bulky Microsoft Keyboard Natural Elite is just too bulky, now), mouse, and 2.0 speakers. While these peripherals do not impact day-to-day performance, they are the parts that I and any LAN buddies see, so I need to get rid of a lot of the legacy parts to go with spanking new internal configurations.

 The Asus R2H UMPC that I ordered did not arrive before I took off, and I had to tell FedEx to take it back and tell Dynamism to give me a refund, but I intend to try getting ahold of another UMPC sometime later this year. I'm also going to upgrade my work laptop from the Gateway convertible I've been using for 15 months and go back to a slate. Motion Computing looks to have some higher performance slates on the way that will finally meet my minumum performance desires in a slate format, a consumer option that has previously not been available.

 I also want to get my XBox Live buds back together on a unified front, resurrect our old clan, and websites. I also want to maybe make a go at some of the PC simulators that I decided earlier this year were too complicated for me to take the time to get up to speed on. My website and forums need some serious attention. And I need to get back to participating actively in the various forums. 

So maybe these are my 2nd Quarter resolutions, after my intended level of activity for the New Year has aparently fallen short? Who knows...I don't even know if I actually will have the time to really pull all of this off. But I definitely have the urge...so I'll see where it takes me.

Well, the new year has come and gone without much ado. I finally finished my rewatch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy this morning, and plan on watching Red Dawn this week. This is one of those DVDs I have had for a couple of years but have never watched. My boxed set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5 was in my mailbox today, and I also watched another episode of Nash Bridges this morning. I see that this series has not gone to DVD yet, but I'm hoping that it will soon, along with most of the other series fans. I moved to my gaming laptop this morning and got back into Neverwinter Nights. I was looking to go back to Prey, but I had to download the version 1.2 patch which took more than my 1 minute maximum wait time for a download since it was 40MB. I printed out a walkthrough for the Peninsula, Prison, and Tanglewood Estate, which is where I am on this outing of the game (I've started it several times but never played all of the way through). I've been doing a lot of cleaning up data wise. I've gone into my Opera brwosers and blocked some sites that I don't want people going to when they are using my PC's. I also disenrolled from Gorgeous Gamer's since no one there talked about games at all. I've also blocked that site content, cleared my History and Data caches on my gaming and media center laptop, and will do the same when I get around to my desktops and work laptop. I plan on doing an upload to GearWERKZ Online probably tonight, and spend some time on XBox Live this afternoon. The next technical article I plan on writing for the website is an iPod and iTunes Configuration Hints and Tips. I figure a lot of people who view the site got some version of iPod for Christmas. Since I've had mine, I've peiodically seen the iPod guidebooks in the stores and have questioned why on earth anyone would pay for one. Now that I've been using my 80GB iPod 5G and iPod Shuffle for a little over a month now, I've realized that there are some esoteric features that you would not know about without spending some time messing around with your 'Pod. I may as well post some of these lessons learned for free for people's consumption. I may also get around to archiving some of the GearWERKz OnLine 3.0 content; my site is now on version 4.0. I basically wiped all of last year's content, but still have it in a FrontPage webfolder on my portable external hard drive. I want to write more technical features on a regular basis on the site this year, so the iPod article will be the first. I also need to do more editorials, which will be tough since I changed the LaBlog page to less of a blog and more of a weekly op-ed format. I'm not certain how much additional content I can develope for the GearWERKZ_Ed section. I also want to try and build a forum on the site, or at least figure out how to make reader comments feasible off the different entries. I'm not sure exactly how much FrontPage can do and I plan on moving all of the machines to FrontPage 2003 this year, since I'm still using Office XP. All of this may have to wait for a week or two, as the name of the game for this week is getting started on my screenplay for the short film myself a few buddies have agreed to work on. I told them I would be working on it and have a draft for their review in the month of January, but I did not do one thing on it over the holiday break since I spent so much time facelifting the website.

As I headed into the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and for the remainder of the year, my sessions on XBL were not as good as they had been through the first three-quarters of 2006. I just think the group of friends that I had played with was starting to move in different directions. The trend seems to have reversed somewhat over the holiday vacation time, as a few of us got into Call of Duty 3 multiplayer, which I think is shockingly better than most of the media gives it credit for. Additionally, a few of the guys got RB6V, and enjoyed playing some of my favorite mode, which is Cooperative Terrorist Hunt. I was able to get a lot of things done over the last weekend of the month, including cleaning my disgusting bathroom. On the technical front, I did a major overhaul of my website, www.gearwerkz.com, and reconciled and made backups of my iTunes database (although I still have the Backup PC to do). I've also had some time on the side to nearly finish my viewing of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and a few episodes of Nash Bridges.

Since my workout partner did not want to meet this morning until 7:30 to lift weights, I had an extra 30 minutes in my morning routine to squeeze in some time with Star Trek Voyager Elite Force. Since I spent my Christmas vacation back home in Georgia playing through Soldier of Fortune II on my Asus Z96J gaming laptop, I decided to do a run-thru of this title, which was also developed by Raven Software.

Since I had to go into the office today, I spent some of my work laptop's CPU cycles synchronizing my iTunes database while I checked email on my desktop. I use the laptop as my primary iTunes PC, but I keep a backup of the entire iTunes library on a Maxtor One Touch III mini 100Gb HD that I take with me on travel, so today I backed up my last three months of downloads and the rest of the library to the HD.

 Now I am using that hard drive to back up the master library to my home network, so that my PC's in the GearWERKZ will have access to it. One small not of ire is that my main PC did the random reboot thing that it used to do all of the time back when I first built it. It used to do this sometimes when accessing a USB hard drive for an extended period of time, just like I'm doing now while backing up 28GB of encoded audio and podcasts. Hopefully it won't happen again; I only got through the D's the first time through, and now it's only in the H's, which means it is probably not even halfway through yet.

I watched the first 30 minutes of Return of the King out on the big screen. Apparently, sometime last year, I recorded an episode of the Sci-Fi Channel's "California's Most Haunted". I came across it while screening my TV recordings on DVD. I watched it, and am now disturbed for the evening, and will probably have problems sleeping. Great.

I also played an hour or so of Far Cry. Have I mentioned how much I despise not having a save anywhere feature? One of my resolutions for 2007 is to not buy any game for the PC which does not have save anywhere...unless it is extremely good, or a potential runner for Game of the Year...or both...oh, fooey.

Well, I did get some playtime in with Prey yesterday. unfortunately, I spent my first 30 minutes or so troubleshooting. The game hung-up in the pre-load screen every time I tried to start it. I think I resolved it to the game trying to access the internet and getting blocked by Zone Alarm. In most games, when the Zone Alarm warning window comes up, the game basically alt-tab's itself back to the desktop so that I can click the Allow or Deny button. But with Prey and its preload screen, it just hung there. It was entirely a guess, since I could not see the desktop, but setting Zone Alarm to Game Mode and Allowing all access attempts (and putting my modem in standby...so no nasty critters could get in), seemed to resolve the issue.

I did meet up with my buddies on XBL and finally got around to playing some Call of Duty 3 Multiplayer. This thing is a sleeper hit and I'm amazed there is not more buzz going around about it. It puts the serious smack-down on Resistance: Fall of Man multiplayer and I'm now bothered that that game is getting more hype simply because it's a PS3 launch title. The class-based system, game mechanics, and game modes all place CoD 3 far and above the mediocre offering that is Resistance: Fall of Man. I'll defintely be playing more of this...I hosted a 20-man match last night and it was absolutely awesome. I'm not too happy about the setup interface, but I'm hoping this can be addressed in an update. I'll be heading over to Treyarch and/or Activision's home pages to post suggestions and hope they are at least reviewed for input.

Well, I am back. 550 miles at just about exactly 8 hours. I did wind up finishing Soldier of Fortune II, and got a couple of hours in on Company of Heroes. It's amazing to see the small level of controversy about this game. Some people think it's a shoe-in for game of the year, others think it is nothing new and that it has a lot of wash-rinse-repeat to it once you're passed the halfway mark. I'm at about 5.5 hours into the game, and despite the fact that I agree with the latter sentiment, that the game has not shown the old dog a whole lot of new tricks, it is exilirating to play. The missions do a pretty good job of keeping you busy on multiple fronts without overloading you. The AI is somewhat above par, as when I am occupied with a northern offensive, I am confident that my sourthern forces guarding the base will engage and handily deal with most inbound threats.

That being said, I do get somewhat perturbed by the path-following, as I do not understand why my airborne units close to within rock-throwing distance to engage Nazi's with their assault rifles. But at least on defense the AI handles itself amicably.

I'm switching off of my gaming laptop to my main desktop and the name of the game for the afternoon will be Prey. Tonight I'll hop onto XBL since I have not gamed with any of my Live friends in over a week. It will be interesting to see what those guys are up to. I'll also watch about an hour of The Two Towers today while I'm chowing down.