I’ve just returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest to attend Mark and Robin’s reception and see the gang. Here’s a lil blow-by-blow:

6-28-03: Arrive (two hours late due to an unexpected plane switch in Cincinnati; luckily we switched on the ground) in PDX around 1. George picks me up in the World’s Jankiest Truck, which I am thankful for. We spirit off to Mark and Robin’s (M&R’s hereafter), and are put to work 15 seconds after arrival threading beads. Mark is the fastest bead-slinger. I am the slowest. Such is life. Acquire taquitos at Jack in the Box. We played some Epic Duels with M, G, Mark’s friend Grey, and George’s friend Claire. George suffers his only defeat for the whole week after a brutal tag-team in a 2vs3 match. Install my version of Rise of Nations that evening and eventually get it running right (thanks Mark n Grey!). Amazingly, George and I leave at a reasonable hour to crash at the Reed Christian Pad.

6-29-03: Awake at 8 to go see Colin in his first bike race, 4 laps on Mt. Tabor. Colin gets cocky and attacks early but still finishes an impressive 4th. G runs off to speak with God and I take the bus across town with Diana, meeting Colin at their place (C&D’s hereafter), which is quite swanky, including two full living rooms (but only one with Grand Theft Auto, which oddly is the one we ended up in). Ben begins learning how to jack foolz and pop caps in their asses immediately. Brandon arrives in town early evening in the Most Valuable Vehicle (MVV), da Durango. We should have filmed a commercial and sent it to Dodge this weekend, cause we really got a chance to use it’s tasty SUV-ness. We even had the racially-balanced group of young people which is so important these days (they could have air-brushed my ass out and replaced me with a golden retriever or something). We all went off to a tasty Chinese dinner at Legann (SP?) on 82nd with a bunch of Mark’s peoples. George ate roughly 6 times as much as the rest of us combined, impressive several of the ladies in the process. I’m so proud of him, having found the ability to woo women by gorging himself. He’s come so far! Then off to Avalon with G, C, and Brandon. Brandon whooped all our asses in air hockey, a fact he made sure to remind us of over the subsequent seven days. A good time was had by all. Then back to the comfy confines of C&D’s for some more GTA and bullshitting.

6-30-03: Day of the reception!! We wake up late, hit off some more RoN and venture to Tigard to have it our way. Then more gaming and off to the reception when Colin and Diana get home from work (you poor guys!). The day turned out colder than predicted, but the reception was big fun with great food (especially the Middle Eastern stuff). We catch up with a bunch of people and play some volleyball (mostly poorly, cept for G and Mark’s friend Jeff, who is roughly 11 feet tall). Mark and Robin played off the cake cutting, but I kinda felt myself a little choked up nonetheless. It’s crazy how life works sometimes; I guess it’s just nice to celebrate people and relationships sometimes, and our group doesn’t seem to do that too often. It was good to have a little party, no matter how laid back. Due to the overestimation of the turnout, there is a LOT of leftover food, which is distributed among a bunch of people. Then back to C&D’s where George commences demolishing the Chinese and the BBQ leftovers. More RoN and GTA as well.

7-1-03: Wake late and game a little, then we hit the road and had some Mexican food near M&R’s at La Carreta (which Brandon probably regrets, ask him why). Then over to gather George’s and my stuff and Brandon offers to drop George at the SKI CABIN, so we hit the road in a hurry to Mt. Hood. On the way we sample G’s favorite music (read: Milli Vanilli, Paula Abdul, Whitesnake heh heh). The sun was low in the sky and the scenery was gorgeous! Definitely worth the trip. After a few minutes shooting the bull with Johnny, who was subbing for G, we hit the road. Destination: Seattle. During the 3-hour ride, Brandon actually remembers each car (4 of em) which passed us on the drive. You figure out what it means! Stop of at Denny’s for midnight breakfast and then on to Brandon’s casa downtown, which was quite nice if small and within walking distance of EVERYTHING. A bit of PS2 gaming and we crash, having to get up early the next day. We also see the worst set of pictures I’ve ever witnessed of what happens when you get bit by a spider and get necrosis (hint: it’s bad).

7-2-03: We wake up early to make an appointment across some frickin body of water in Bellevue, to take in the trusty Durango. From there, a cab to see the first showing of Terminator 3 at a nearby theater. I thought it was amusing, more funny and less action than T2 but worth it. We made friends with a cabbie after Brandon laid on the charm (it’s the Harry Potter thing, good conversation starter). I guess if you are a cabbie long enough, you eventually have to deliver a baby and who knows what else. Turns out the car we took in had no problem, so that was a waste. Lunch at a fusion Cajun/Irish place. Good food, but I mean, I’m just sick of all the Cajun/Irish places out there. Don’t people have any imagination? I learn the benefits of the minigun in Vice City, and we have Chinese for dinner (there Brandon, are you happy now that I told everyone?). I love Brandon’s place, there’s like 50 restaurants within 2 minutes of walking. Maybe it’s not a good thing, as for the next roughly 48 hours we didn’t do anything but bullshit, game, and watch movies (I saw 4! all of them i’d seen before! how dumb is that?!)

7-3-03: More useless gaming! Lunch @ Mexican (another bad move, MR. Bond!) and dinner @ Italian.

7-4-03: We go to a July 4th BBQ at Brandon’s apartment complex. Full of interesting young people with cool talents (i.e. a ten-year-old who asked people to throw plastic forks at him all night so he could test our his shield fashioned from a plastic platter…I actually got good at lobbing the forks OVER the D). I heard some cool hip-hop from some guys who are up on underground stuff, and hopefully will get a copy of a CD compliling stuff produced by Kayne West (if Brandon hooks me up, come on dawg). Finally get back after another Jack in the Box run around 2:30 and we decide to play and not sleep.

7-5-03: Wake up at 6:30 after an hour of sleep (train left early) and haul our asses to the train station, where I say farewell to Brandon. Sleep most of the ride and get into PDX at 11 AM. Roll over to Dharma’s pad where we catch up for several hours, with one trip to 23rd in NW for food at the Cameo Cafe (hotcakes the size of a pizza, I shit you not). I also procured some tasty treats at a bakery up there but then left em at D’s place. Hope you enjoyed it, Dharma! Early evening, I roll back to M&R’s on the 19. We hit up Dairy Queen for dinner (my first DQ dinner, woo!) and then go down to Belmont for another Avalon trip. After shooting the breeze with Dylan and Doug, we think better of nickling it and return to the pad for some RoN.

7-6-03: We had dinner at Thanh Thao’s with C&D, which was quite good. It’s too bad I didn’t get into TT’s more until after I left PDX. Then back to M&R’s for some Cranium, where I drew a bad-ass tennis racket blind. Unfortunately, George wasn’t feeling me and M&R carried the day.

7-7-03: Wake up late (notice a pattern?) and finally make the Chang’s pilgrimage (TM) for lunch: G, Mark, Scott, and I. The soy seemed a little weak but otherwise, it was quite happening. Adhering strictly to the one-garlic-scoop rule, we improvised. Mark and I disgraced ourselves by eating like just over 2 bowls between us, but G was on the ball with a solid first run and a double-bowl on the second. We had leftovers for dinner and watched “Shaolin Soccer” as well, which was SUPER funny. I think I might have to rent or buy it to see it again. An instant classic. We ate some leftovers for dinner and George cooked some food for a late-night snack. Then Mark and I dominated in Pictionary, Mark won a quick round of the Great Khan Game, and we made the mistake of staying up later to play some DungeonQuest. Basically, DungeonQuest consists of the following steps: you all pick a character (they’re all the same) and one “magic ring” (also, all the same). Then you wander into a randomly-generated dungeon, where you get bitten by flies, fall into spiked pit traps, spun around by rotating rooms, and eventually flung into a bottomless pit. The person who dies last is the winner, I guess…

7-8-03: Lunch at the hotcake house. My poor GI system is ill-equipped for that kind of thing these days. Then we trekked back to the pad for some online 3-player RoN with Brandon; we seemed to be getting a lot better, easily beating even numbers at tough-tougher. Aside from the intermittent crashes, these were some fun games. Hooked up some Teriyaki for dinner. That evening, an epic game of Talisman, with M and G (Scott had to work so he left early, his Samurai sitting dutifully in wait for him for the remainder of the game). In the end, I beat George to the punch by a single turn (lucky, cause he had been whooping my ass for several turns) and rolled a lucky ending, whereupon the dragon king ate my enemies.

7-9-03: Take the MAX to the airport on two hours sleep…get stuck on the runway in Cincy (AGAIN) in a massive LOUD thunderstorm, arrive at home just after 11. I read the entirety of PKD’s “The Man in the High Castle” over the course of the day. I still have to think more before I can describe the book. Nevertheless, it was quite riveting.

Thanks everyone for big fun! If Mark has some pictorial depictions from his new camera of anything I talked about above, I welcome him to post em or send em to me so I can include them. I’m trying to become a blog-picture-whore like Melhus.

Mark & Robin: I hope that your wedding reception was a success on Monday! I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there to hang out with you guys. I hope that Schrag honored my absence with several misplaced comments in poor taste, as that’s what I would have done. I also have to ask (based on last week’s posts) how many cars Woo-Hah tried to “borrow” over the weekend to help people out, perhaps he could have served as the valet (a la Ferris Bueller, no doubt).

KT and I celebrated in our own way (yesterday) by spending the day at Six Flags New England in “glorious” western Massachusetts. It was a pretty nice day, and we spent just over 9 hours at the park. We mostly stuck to roller coasters (KT’s favorite), but we also spent a few hours at the water park (my favorite). Here’s what we rode, in order:

• Flashback (not a good ride to “warm-up” on)
• Cyclone (I like these old wooden coasters, they’re kind)
• Blizzard River (longest line of the day)
• Thunderbolt (another wooden coaster, but smaller)
• Scream (200 ft. straight up, then down. Terrifying.)
• Mind Eraser (the picture at right says it all)
• Batman (just kept my eyes closed, focused on survival)

.sixflags.com/parks/newengland/rides/superman.asp”>Superman after all that physical and emotional abuse, plus it was after 9:00 pm and the line was pretty long. Of course, it’s supposedly one of the best rollercoasters in the country, but I’m sure that the person that believes that is also comfortable taking a 208 ft. drop at 80 mph. I am not.

Everybody….

Grill meister.

Don’t look!

Food is yummy to eat.

Guess who’s home?

Who brought this guy?

The Zboard, by ideazon, is a keyboard which takes interchangeable key layouts for different applications. The review sample I received* is a base keyboard with a Windows/IE interface. The ideazon rep also sent key layouts for Photoshop, Medal of Honor, and Age of Mythology.

“What the heck am I talking about?” you ask. Basically, the Zboard is just like a regular keyboard with a few exceptions:

1. It features some special keys above the F-keys; one launches media player, another IE, there’s mute and other audio controls, etc. This feature appears on some other keyboards from Logitech and the like.
2. There’s nice labels on some of the keys to let you know what those keys do in combination with the control or windows key. For example, the “W” key also has “Close” silk-screened on it letting you know that if you Control-W you’ll close the current window or document. Handy feature.
3. The biggest feature, the keys can be removed and replaced with another set of keys featuring different hot-keys or key combinations for use with specific applications. The Photoshop interface, for example, features tons of keyboard short-cuts for many of the image manipulation tools you can use. Furthermore, each interface does not have to follow the traditional QWERTY layout. This is most evident with the Medal of Honor interface where the whole left side has been replaced with movement keys and the QWERTY alphabet has been shifted over to the right. Pretty neat.

Check out this demo!

So, how does it work?

Basically, each interface has a chip in it which tells the base which layout has been installed and what each key does. Additionally, some software which came with it on a CD lets you program the special keys at the top and I’m guessing hooks each layout with a specific application like Medal of Honor.

And how *well* does it work?

I’m typing up this review with the basic Windows/IE interface. The keys are harder to push than the ones on my old keyboard which is making my hands tire out faster. This also makes it harder for me to capitalize as sometimes I’m not pressing the shift key down far enough apparently. Still, the handyness of knowing what all the hot-keys are and the usefulness of the top row of special keys is a very nice feature.

When I first saw the Zboard at the Game Developer’s Conference last March, I saw the Medal of Honor layout and assumed one could use that interface with any FPS by just reprogramming the FPS using the game’s in-game settings. Currently, I’m playing Splinter Cell and so tried it out. Unfortunately, it seems, the MoH layout will only work with MoH! I’ll try it with some other FPS games in the future so might amend this statement later, but, if this is the case, it’s not exactly useful for me since I stopped playing MoH months ago. I haven’t tried the Age of Mythology interface with one of the RTS games I have, but I don’t have AoM, so if it only works with that game, I won’t even be able to try it out! IMO, this greatly diminishes the attractiveness of the Zboard since most of the hard-core gamers I know go through like a game a month. To expect them to pay for a new interface for each game I think is asking for too much.

Since I couldn’t get the MoH interface to work with Splinter Cell, I switched back to the standard IE interface and played with that. That’s when I encountered something buggy. It seems that you can’t hold down one button and then hold down another and have the first button continue to register reliably. This, of course, happens all the time with an FPS–hold down W to move forward, then hold down D to sidestep while continuing to move forward, then let go of D but not W. Sometimes I would stop moving forward. Sometimes, even worse, I would continue to move sideways like the key was stuck. When I noticed this I thought it odd. When an enemy saw me because I stepped out of the shadows, I switched back to my old $7 keyboard! Not a good recommendation!

The Zboard as a training tool for the working world, however, might be where this product has the most promise. Photoshop has new features every time a new version comes out, but the standard functions will always be there. And when I say standard, I mean like oh… a hundred or so commands. To have a handy way of accessing those commands without having to wade through the drop down menus is of great benefit. If you’re even just a casual Photoshop user, getting the Zboard and the Photoshop interface might be money well spent. I have not yet had time to check out this set-up and will post an update as soon as I do!

*on behalf of OMSI who are currently revamping the tech hall and are trying out different human-computer interfaces to demo on the floor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear keyboards are a good interface to demo unsupervised since they allow visitors to do pretty much whatever they want with the computer…

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Aight… So we went out drinking with my boy Mark one night. You might remember Mark as the dude that can’t keep his eyes open. Yup. That’s him there, with his eyes closed. Typical. Anyway, we were all psyched to watch the T’Wolves get some revenge on the Lakers, but the Lakers beat the pants off of them. Oh well.

We had a few beers. We took a few pictures. A good time was had by all, except that we almost missed the last train home! Whoops.

This picture is kinda sideways —->

Jenny thought that she looked cute in my Kapalua visor, but I think it was the Curious George shirt that brought the cuteness. Although, it was a little awkward when Mark tried to collect data from the little guy. Oh yeah, did you notice that Lara is rocking a Canada hat? Bet you didn’t.

I don’t know what the thing in the bottom corner is, but it sure looks bright. Maybe that’s why Mark’s eyes are closed… Then again, maybe not.

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Later in the week, we went to the Mass Ave for some breakfast. The usual + bacon for this special occasion.

How about a toast? white or wheat…

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I was really busy this week, and didn’t get to hang out too much with these crazy girls. They went to various places. Saw certain things. For example: this tree.

I think that they were fond of trees, because they made another friend with this blooming young fella:

So, I had a lot of crazy meetings this week (7-11 pm two nights in a row!). The girls decided to grab Katie and have a good old time in the North End without me. Is that rude, or just really smart?

They had dinner at some Italian joint, and then loaded up on Cannoli’s from Mike’s pastries.

Wow. Boston looks pretty good at night…

Then it was time to go home and pig out. They are so lucky they didn’t spill any cannoli on my new couch!

Grils just love dessert.

Amazingly, they saved one for me.

It was good.

Splinter Cell is probably known by most of the people who read this blog. It’s been given extremely high accolades by many gaming magazines. Tons of fans couldn’t wait for it to be released to PC, PS2, or Gamecube, and before it happenend the case for buying an Xbox was that much stronger. What many people don’t realize, however, is that the stealth shooter is not a new thing in the PC gaming world, and, in fact, recently one came out, Hitman 2: The Silent Assassin, which is IMO just as good as Splinter Cell. Here’s a comparison.

Introduction

In Splinter Cell you play as a covert agent in a super secret US agency. The premise is that data encryption is so sophisticated nowadays that a reversion to more traditional forms of espionage is needed; in other words, agent insertion. Stealth is of utmost importance; leave no witnesses; better to kill someone than to have them identify you.

Hitman 2, by contrast, has you play as a hired assassin working for a global mercenary “problem-solving” agency. You aren’t necessarily playing for the “good guys”; you’re just doing an assignment. Stealth is still important, but disguises may work just as well. Instead of always sneaking about, you can infiltrate your target’s organization by posing as a henchman or civilian.

Moves and Controls

Both games are over-the-shoulder FPS games (which I guess makes them third-person shooters), so they both have similar control schemes (as made standard by Half-Life). The WSAD keys in combination with the mouse moves you around.

In Hitman 2 you can run, walk, crouch, drag bodies to dark corners (some really cool and sometimes funny ragdoll effects here), and zoom your view in and out a bit. Splinter cell lets you adjust your speed in two different stances (upright and crouched) using the mouse wheel, so you could run, jog, or walk kinda like Mario. Splinter Cell features some additional moves your character can do, like rappeling, jumping up between two close walls so that you are above the ground a foot on each wall (a la Jean Claude van Damme in Time Cop or Jet Li in Black Mask), and moving along the edge of a wall or building or along a pipe hand over hand style, whereas Hitman 2 features some scripted actions, like climbing out a specific window.

When you come upon a door, both games allow you to take a peek at what’s behind; Splinter Cell with a fiber-optic camera and Hitman 2 by having you peep through the key hole.

Splinter Cell features a light meter (similar to No One Lives Forever 2) which lets you know if you are hidden or plainly visible to your enemies while Hitman 2 has an alertness meter which is much more spastic (but not in a bad way) which keeps track of how suspicious your enemies are of you. For Splinter Cell if the meter goes up really high, you are in broad daylight, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone can see you at your current location. In Hitman 2 if your meter goes up too high, someone *will* walk towards you and investigate. They may have already spotted you ages ago; it’s only now that they think you might be an unwanted trespasser.

Objectives and Methods

Admittedly I only just bought Splinter Cell yesterday so have not finished the game yet, but from what I’ve seen I think I can assume all the missions feature you sneaking into an area, doing some espionage, and maybe killing or disabling certain things (like alarms) before going to the extraction zone. You are wearing a black uniform commando-style and have things like night-vision goggles, fiber-optic door peeper, and a trusty silenced side-arm. Gameplay pretty much boils down to observing patterns in guards movements, taking advantage of darkness, and sneaking around a whole lot, knocking out or sometimes killing when necessary.

Hitman 2, by comparison, lets you choose which items to bring for each mission, most of these being of the weapon category ranging from piano wire to assault rifles and a whole butt-load of ammunition. During a mission you can take out a guard or civilian and change into his clothes, thus having a disguise for the rest of mission (but if you are seen killing with the disguise on or if someone discovers the naked body of the person you took out, your disguise is blown). Gameplay in Hitman 2 often involves walking around (painfully slowly in a very good way) in plain sight and getting stressed out the whole time, watching your alertness meter frantically move up and down as you approach enemy guards hoping they don’t take the time to take a closer inspection. If you run, your meter goes up; if you crouch, your meter goes up; if you do anything out of the ordinary, your meter goes up. As its name implies, for most missions your objective is to kill a certain person, but each mission plays out a little differently to great effect. For example, on one mission you infiltrate a Yakuza bosses’ home to take him out. You can go in guns blazing (which is always an option for almost all the missions) or you can sneak into the kitchen, knock out the cook, prepare the blowfish sushi wrong, and wait for the servant to take out the boss for you while you make for the exit!

Ending a Mission

If there’s one aspect of the game which Hitman 2 does much better than Splinter Cell, it’s the mission endings. In both games, ending a mission involves going to the extraction point. In Splinter Cell your mission just ends, you get a cut-scene, and then it’s on to the next mission.

In Hitman 2, you are given a screen which shows your statistics for the mission: how many people you killed, how many alarms were raised, shots taken vs. shots scored, and an overall rating of how you did. Scoring a Silent Assassin rating means only killing your target (often using a quieter weapon than a gun, even if silenced) without anyone knowing about it. On top of that, enemies you take out during a mission can be searched for additional weapons or ammo and any weapons you gather during a mission are available to choose from in subsequent missions. You have a base of operations between missions which includes a garden shack loaded with gun racks which are empty at the beginning of the game and hopefully full by the end of the game, sort of a trophy room. This makes replayability very high; I played the game once normally, played again to try to get every weapon in the game, and played yet again to try to get Silent Assassin on each level (which precludes you getting all the weapons in the game).

Conclusion

Which game is better? Well, they both are very, very fun games if you’re into stealthy tactics and together they make a great combo. If I had to choose, I’d go with Hitman 2, but to be fair, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve yet to finish Splinter Cell, so we’ll see. I just don’t think Splinter Cell will have a great replay value, unless I set a personal goal to be as stealthy as possible or, alternatively, to kill as many people as possible, etc.

I like this trend for stealthy FPS games and am looking forward to Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3!

I watched it on opening day during my extended lunch hour. 🙂 A coworker and I just slipped out, picked up Robin, and went to the movies and lunch for 3 hours…

The movie was good. In terms of action it was grittier than the first, scarier in showing the raw power of some of these mutants. In terms of story, well it was okay. When I saw that William Stryker was in the movie, I was really looking forward to the Sentinels, but that didn’t happen.

They’ve introduced a few new mutants (Nightcrawler, Deathstrike, Iceman, Pyro), but that sort of makes up for the fact that some of them from the last movie are gone (Sabertooth, Toad). The biggest problem about the first movie I thought was that it didn’t go into all of the characters enough and spent too much time on Wolverine. Well, this movie is a slight improvement in balancing out who is featured, but it also short-changes some of the roles, and I mean really, really short-changes them. Cyclops is in the movie for maybe 15 minutes, Nightcrawler has a great intro and then just sort of gets dropped, Deathstrike has like one line in the whole movie which is a shame since Kelly Hu is at least as good an actress as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. The kids Iceman and Pyro make a pretty good introduction but don’t get the same screen time as the adults which is fine and makes sense, but Rogue is given as much a role as them, which when compared to the first movie is slightly disappointing. Storm plays about the same as the first movie, she is just there. Colossus even makes a brief appearance and according to Robin, he was hunky.

Jean is featured pretty well in this movie, which I think doesn’t jive well with Scott’s afore-mentioned 15 minutes. In the comics they are a pair and really have a sort of synergy when teamed together making for a more team-based feel to the X-men. Scott has been given a lesser role in the movies which really sucks since he is supposed to be the in-the-field commander second to Xavier only when out of battle. Xavier depends on him to lead the team in the field. The movie portrayal also gives an unfortunate disbelief in the Jean-Scott-Logan love triangle; who in their right mind would stick with Scott as he is portrayed in the movies?

The X jet plays a pretty big role in the movie, too, which is fine, but it’d be cool if they featured more of the ground vehicles like the motorcycle from the first movie.

So, I thought the first movie should have been about 30 minutes longer and after viewing the deleted scenes on the DVD, I became satisfied. Maybe the same will be true for this movie.

All in all, a good movie, continuing the trend of good adaptations of comics to the big screen, but not as good as say Spider-man. And The Hulk has the potential to be better. I think X-men will really shine as a series if they do make more and continue to focus on different characters each time. The last scene pretty much hints at a sequel with potentially amazing special effects.

I was extremely disappointed that the viking kittens singing the immigrant song was taken off of www.rathergood.com when I wanted to set my boss’ computer to always be redirected to that site no matter what domain he typed into his web browser for April Fool’s.

Tonight, Robin mentioned that she wanted to show a friend of hers, so I went looking. Here it is in all it’s glory!

http://www.markdangerchen.net/media/blog/viking_kittens.swf

You rule, Dr. Schrag.

I totally forgot that you were defending today. I was thinking about driving down to heckle you, but then I contracted SARS over the weekend at the Red Sox game (they came back from 0-5 against Toronto to win 6-5 on a Nomar walk-off HR in the bottom of the ninth… WOW). Still feeling a little nasty today, but both Britney and I are very proud of you!

Go ahead, take a little time to enjoy Britney over at http://www.britneyspears.com/. You’ve EARNED it. What’s next? Lemme guess….

For those of you that are interested, I posted a few pictures of my new place in the articles section. Thanks to Lara for the images…

Especially for you, Mr. Danger, photoshop tennis. Seems to be over now, but a clever idea: one designer creates a photoshop layer, and a second designer returns “volley” by adding an additional layer, and so on…

This is the outside:

This is the kitchen area.

The U-shaped kitchen provides a lot of surface area for cooking, but not a significant amount of storage space. The Corian countertop was chosen to match the concrete surface at the left, and the red highlight on the edge was supposed to match the red accents on the Vulcan stove. The stove is a heavy-duty commercial-grade unit with four gigantic gas burners and an oven (no broiler, though… a minor bummer ). It’s not insulated, which is why you see the spacing between it and the cabinets and why there is a strip of concrete flooring under the stove and along the cabinets. The exhaust fan is a KitchenAid (I think). The refrigerator and dishwasher are from the GE Profile line. In the upper-right corner, you can see where the wall is open to the mechanical closet. None of the interior walls extend all the way to the ceiling.

This is the TV area.

It’s tough to tell with the shades drawn, but the windows are slightly below grade. They get a significant amount of direct sunlight, but you can’t see too much from them. In this picture, you can see the exposed rafters in the ceiling. There are numerous exposed pipes throughout the unit.

These are babies chilling at the domicile.

Right behind the couch, there is a square (2’X2′) brick column. There are four of these incorporated into the unit, but this is the only one that is free-standing. On top of the column, there is a huge wooden beam that supports the ceiling. On the right, the double doors lead to one of the two closets. This closet contains the water heater and the air heating unit.

This is where the “magic” happens.

Can’t see much in this picture, but the brick is another one of the columns in the unit. The big pipe that is next to it is a drain from the roof, and the tub/shower is half enclosed by the pillar.