Finally watched E3. Always thought the series was overrated, but this was definitely the best of the new releases. Portman was excellent, except for the big belly. I liked the way they did the move of Skywalker to the dark side, they made it very 'evil.' It almost makes me want to watch 4, 5 and 6 again because Darth Vader is such as badass. One day I may have to force myself to watch Lord of the Rings since I got bored after 30 mins (really really bored). I heard it does get better, but I won't be watching the sequel if the first doesn't get moving at some point.

Found this video of the place where I did my 2 tandem jumps. The guy you first see on the ladder in the video is the one who jumped with me on my first. Bunch of cool guys work there, Skydive Miami. If you are in the area and looking for one of the best experiences of your life, check it out.

Video

Something I learned about storing application data in .Net. You may have tried using

    Application.UserAppDataPath

which returns a string representing the user's application data plus the application's company name, name and version number. If you weren't looking for all that additional stuff, you should try using the

    Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder)

method. In this case passing the

    Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData

parameter is sufficient.

My projects site is in the works.

Valve got me to buy Half-Life 2: Episode One which is the first of three episodes that continue the Half-Life story. First off I wasn't that impressed with Half-Life 2, although I was addicted to Counter Strike: Source which was the multiplayer portion that shipped with the game.

I think this is one of the games that is very well made. The graphics, sound, and controls as separate components are all excellent. But the game just didn't come together as well as it should have. It is pretty hard to identify the problem, and it may come down to the killing mechanics. It's just not that fun shooting the enemies. They don't react as well to shots as they could have. Take Goldeneye (N64) for example, enemies react depending on the exact area they were hit and that animation which stuns them for a short time gives you that feeling of being a bad ass. It also makes it easier to not get hit during a gunfight if you get the first hit, rewarding you for being a marksman.

They also sometimes draw out a gamplay mechanic for far too long. In Half-Life 2 the vehicle levels felt drawn out and they did the same thing in Episode One with the gravity gun and 'creating those bridges' (trying not to spoil it).

For $10 I would have probably felt better about this purchase (it costs $20), which lasted maybe 5 hours with no replay value. If you are a Half-Life fan you will like this game, just don't expect anything groundbreaking. This is more of an expansion than a new game. I certainly won't be getting Episode 2.

Live Messenger now has the ability to check your Xbox Live friends list.

News

I got Perfect Dark Zero for $13 USD used, woot.

I recommend anyone who wants to try out AJAX (Asychronous Javascript and XML) and use ASP .Net 2.0 to check out Atlas. It is very easy to use and you don't even need to know any Javascript (except for the most advanced stuff). This site is built with this framework and it was the first time I've worked with AJAX. Watch some of the videos on that site and you should be good to go.

This seems like a good idea. A web site that keeps track of those phone calls listed as Private or Unavailable. It does need people to contribute information to build up their database. But I have found a few numbers there.

WhoCalled.us

How often have you heard this line. "Vista is only XP with a new theme". To be fair the same could be said about ME->XP, but I couldn't be paid to run ME (well, up to a certain amount). As a software developer I know the amount of work that goes into the non-visual part of a program, the part that's not on display at conference shows, the magician's assistant who does 90% of the trick but gets none of the fame (or the women). To please customers software has to have more tangible features with a prettier user interface. I mean, there has to be some way to sneak the more important features to the user.
 
"But all the new features have been done in OSX though (Calendar, Photos, Movie), so none of them count". Would you not want a car company to sell cars with air conditioners because it has already been done? It still takes money to make, should a company give it away for free? Remember all the 2+ button mice that came before the Mighty Mouse? How about all the music players before the iPod? I know it's hard to justify purchasing software upgrades, but no system will ever be perfect. We all learn from mistakes, and given a second chance, MOST programmers will do a better job.

My personal feeling about Apple? I certainly wouldn't want them to be in first place. Not only would I have to buy their operating system, but their hardware too! Other than my laptop, I haven't bought a premade in maybe 7 years. I like reusing parts to save money, I like picking all my components, and I like having a case with enough slots for multiple optical drives.

I've been playing around with Beta 2 of Vista, and my biggest complaint is its speed. I have it installed on my test PC which is an Athlon XP 2400+ with 1 gig of memory and a Geforce 5200. I may upgrade the video card soon, but with the current setup the hard drive is access way too much, and videos (not high def) seem to skip with nothing else going on. I like the new user interface, and I'm very happy they moved it away from the old Bitmap design. Maximizing/minimizing windows could be more streamlined cause it sucks seeing the window being redrawn. Being able to run as a restricted user will hopefully protect people from viruses/worms. My prediction is that most users will give the virus permission anyway (bah). Those Kournikova pics are too hard to avoid. They could probably catch me with Keira though, lol.

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I've been renting most of my games from Gamerang. I bought NBA2K6 since renting it for multiplayer action for $8 each time from Blockbuster was not worth it. The game is $40 new, not the regular $60.

I was looking to buy an HDTV this year, maybe a 32" or 38" flatscreen, but 'lag' issues has me concerned. On July 4th, I took my 360 over to a cousin's house and I got to play on a Samsung rear projection HDTV which felt horrible. Trying to steer in Need for Speed was almost impossible. From what I read these TVs are pretty bad, but that most of them have 'some' lag. I'm now thinking maybe I should delay my purchase.

I delayed getting an LCD monitor because of ghosting, and ending up getting the best gaming monitor according to Tom's Hardware, which was a Hercules 17" with a 20ms response time. It wasn't the cheapest and the black levels arn't that good, but according to their testing it beat all the other monitors which claimed a lower response time. I'm still happy with that purchase and have never had problems with faster games such as Prey (Demo) and Need for Speed Underground. I even notice a difference between my Hercules and my Dell 15" laptop (laptop screen seems much slower). So if you hear about any ultimate gaming HDTVs, pass it along.

The last level of the single player campaign is probably one of the most frustrating experiences I've had in gaming lately. The objective is to infiltrate the enemy base to stop a nuclear launch, but expect to die A LOT.

No joke, but expect to die within about 5 seconds after the level starts. And this is while you are parachuting with no place to go. The level doesn't end there, you get to switch to another soldier when you die, with what seems like an unlimited supply of them parachuting in after you are wasted. The problem is you have 10 mins to stop 2 different launches, and their bases are heavily guarded, and it is a pretty long trip from the start location, and the enemies keep respawning, and they have shotguns with insane accuracy, and they keep respawning, and you die, and they respawn, and you die.

Anyway, I stopped the 2 nukes and then found out there is a third, and another timer starts. Climb a stairs, die from shotgun, see enemy when camera shows your dead body. These shotgun guys kill you with one shot, and you don't see them until it is too late, bah. I gave up after a few tries, maybe after I get a little better with the control stick from playing online I will give it another go.

I saw my first Red Lights of Death yesterday. It wasn't a crash or anything, I loss power for about a second then it happened. It was fixed with a reset, glad it was only temporary.