I’m trying to backblog some stuff today and this week. 🙂
The holiday season has basically been a whirlwind of board, card, PC, and video gaming in Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area. Oh, and gooood food, some hectic family get togethers, and friends and family going on amazing international journeys.
To procrastinate writing about it all, I’m updating WordPress and my theme today, too. 😛
Best DS games I played in 2007 (I haven’t yet played Phantom Hourglass)
Hotel Dusk – This game is a masterpiece in storytelling.
Phoenix Wright series – Perfect games for bus riding; no frenetic movements or audio required! The cases are completely over the top and they have a cool habit of relating to each other across the series.
Trace Memory – Also known as Another Code. The previous game by the people who made Hotel Dusk. Also good, but not as. Still, by the end of both games I wished there were sequels to them so I could spend more time with the characters in both stories. Mark of good character development and backstory, I’d say.
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime – fun game. I played this before Dragon Quest VIII, which by the way is an excellent PS2 game.
Minish Cap (technically, a GBA game…) – borrowed this from Andrew and Yo. Just about as good at Ocarina of Time, which basically means it is really, really good.
My brother Max is participating in a crazy ass race across India in 3-wheeled motorized rickshaws (tuk tuks). He left on the 27th and won’t be back to San Francisco until the 23rd or so. Catch all the craziness on the blog run by his team and the other team from SF. He’s already had some mysterious poo event. Joy!
So, I haven’t posted to this blog in about a month. Wow. The main reason being that after upgrading my video card and getting a bigger hard drive, I reinstalled a ton of old games that have had user made mods released over the past couple of years or whatever and started playing them. First it was Vampire Bloodlines and now it’s Oblivion again. I’ll write about them in separate posts, including which mods I’ve been trying. On top of those two, I’ve also played Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2, and HL2 Episode 1 (thanks Aaron!).
Last weekend people in my guild who live in the Pacific Northwest got together down in Portland, so I’ve also played a bunch of boardgames and even got a chance to play Portal during our downtime. 😛 (Check out the Portal end credits song on YouTube!)
Oh, two more things.
My paper on WoW finally got accepted to Games and Culture (a SAGE publication run by Doug Thomas) pending minor revisions (which I’ll get to in January)! Only took a year… :/
This Friday, Robin and I head down to the Bay Area to hang out with my family plus our uncle’s family (him, his wife, their 3 sons, one of the son’s wife, their two kids, and an au pair). You might know one of my cousins (one of the 3 sons) named Leehom Wang, who apparently is like the biggest pop star in Taiwan and was the 4th billed in Ang Lee’s latest movie Lust, Caution. Unfortunately, he’s just coming to San Francisco for a concert on the 23rd and then flying back to Asia the next day. I was hoping to get to know him a bit better. It’ll be cool to hang out with the other two cousins and rest of them, though! Leo and Stacy are totally cool people, and Leekai is like the smartest person in the world.
We had some people over for Thanksgiving last week:
Fun was had by all. The food turned out well, though I haven’t checked with everyone to make sure no one got food poisoning. Robin felt nauseous in the middle of the night, and we used a new recipe from Alton Brown which calls for much less time in the oven than all the other recipes we could find, so we were worried for a bit. But his is based on perfect temperatures… the problem was that our thermometers suck. But the meat was super, super juicy. I guess there’s a fine line between juicy and disease. 😛
We made a ton of gravy, served in our new gravy pitcher from IKEA. That was good.
On Friday, we took Diane and Larry around town, doing the touristy thing. First we went on the Theo chocolate factory tour. Theo uses all organic, fair trade ingredients. No soy lecithin or other crap, which is good for Diane since she’s allergic to soy. She ended up buying a ton of chocolate bars. 🙂
Larry and I went up to the Space Needle’s observation deck, and it was a perfectly clear, crisp day for it. I wish we got there a little earlier, though, since we had some major glare off the water from the mid-afternoon sun. The view of downtown and Mt. Ranier was pretty impressive. I’ll post photos later. Robin didn’t go up with us due to her continued nausea, and her mom didn’t go up due to her extreme fear of heights (she even avoids some bridges which makes traveling up through Portland and Seattle a little difficult given the high number of rivers and canals and such here).
Then we went to Pike Place, though most things were closing, so we ended up just getting dinner at The Islander. We spent a few minutes trying to figure out what Diane could eat (soy allergy, remember) and ended up getting her Honey Walnut Prawns, completely forgetting that mayonnaise often has soy in it, being so focused on avoiding soy sauce… oh well… Also, Robin somehow managed to order something that resembled our turkey dinner the day before. Woops. Larry doesn’t get out much and ended up getting fried chicken, but then wishing he had Diane’s prawn dish, but she loved the taste and ate it, regretting it later (she does that a lot–still eats Oreos, etc.). What I had was great (Pad Thai).
On Saturday, we went to Gasworks and then checked out the UW campus. Crazy day at UW, as we were hosting the Apple Cup, the annual football game vs. Washington State. I hear we lost. 🙁
After checking out the campus, Robin, et. al. dropped me off at Greenlake and went home. I had to go to Amit and Kate’s wedding! It was good.
All this weekend, I was slightly antsy since I had just installed the new hardware on Wednesday, but didn’t get time to check it out until Sunday. The CPU is about twice as fast as my old one (according to 3Dmark06), and the video card is about 3 or 4 times faster than my old one! This basically means that I can turn up the graphics effects and enjoy modern games in all their glory, though I wouldn’t be able to do this at super high resolutions. In a year or two, I’ll do a real upgrade to a completely new system.
Aaron gave me a nice present last week in the form of the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. After installing the new hard drive (and dealing with some issues about cloning the OS and boot system, etc.), I finally had enough free space to install it and other games I’ve been holding onto, including reinstalling WoW. Now to just find some time to play…
I finally got around to installing Itty Bitty RPG over in the sidebar –>
Unfortunately, with my blog’s stylesheet, the pop-up box text is a little small, but you can up the font size of your browser while playing… It’s sort of in beta stage right now and a lot of things aren’t there yet, but still fun to play. Read more about it at the Itty Bitty RPG site.
Also, you’ll notice that there are now two sidebars. Less scrolling!
The Google AdSense has been moved over to single posts so that people who come to the homepage won’t see ads (whereas people who get to specific posts from searching, will). I played around with a plugin that Erik tipped me off on, but it turns out that it only lets you stick ads in WordPress widgets.. and there doesn’t seem to be a widget that can be inserted right after a post in my current theme. Maybe switching themes would work but whatever.
Finally, I divided the search into both a general Google one and one specific to my site… I still need to play around with having Google results be embedded in one of my pages; once I figure that out, those two search boxes will become one again.
Homemade video for Daft Punk (via Collegehumor).
Hooray!
Robin helped me bake a pineapple upside-down cake for the exams.
We had to figure out how to call a committee member in Alaska on the spur of the moment.
When I reread my answers two days ago I thought that my writing improved considerably over the summer (the Spencer app was written much better than answer 1, eg.), so I was a little worried about that.
During the exams, I had a couple of questions that I ended up trying to think/talk through in the moment and that didn’t turn out so well, but I was able to recognize that and cut my answers short. 😛
The process was much more rich conversation like than what most people think about when they think “exams” I’d imagine. In other words, it really was the exact same thing that happened for my undergraduate thesis orals. I guess I have to thank Reed for preparing me for that.
I don’t think there was much doubt about whether I would pass, but I still worry about being caught red-handed trying to pass as an academic. Is that normal?
To celebrate, I bought an internal SATA hard drive, the brand new AMD 3870 video card (the NVidia 8800GT was unavailable and overpriced), and the fastest processor that’ll work on my dated motherboard.
Next week, I might be reinstalling WoW… heh. And I’ll definitely be checking out Gears of War (too slow on my current set-up) and Crysis.
So I’m going to get a bigger hard drive this weekend. I think my mobo supports SATA. Right now I have an internal 180 GB IDE and an external 180 GB USB which is kind of nice symmetry in terms of keeping a backup of my stuff… Initially I was thinking I’d get a bigger disk and then put data on one disk and programs on the other.
But which should I use for what? Do I need a faster disk for data access/media or for applications? Or should I just get another IDE?
If I get a bigger disk, I’m also kind of wondering how I’m going to keep a backup… Get TWO disks? Or maybe make my two old ones backup drives? Hmm.. I suppose if I make the new SATA drive the main one with apps and stick photos, music, and docs on my old one, my old external can still just backup my smaller older data drive… But then I have to reformat and reinstall windows so that the SATA is my primary drive… what a pain…
Any readers have thoughts?