The Greatest Football Play Ever!
I’ve never seen so many laterals in my life! You have to feel sorry for Millsaps after seeing this.
The Orange Box
My boss, Chris, has been getting on to me lately for my lack of gaming. He has been trying to get me to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) so that he can kick my butt with his level gazillion hunter and feel good about himself for ganking a n00b. I generally don’t have much fun with level grinding type games (aka. RPGs), so I have repeatedly turned him down. However, I still wanted to get a new game since the last game that I bought was the Starcraft Warchest (Stacraft and its expansion, Starcraft: Brood War) and the last new game that I played was Half-Life 2: Episode One (thanks Tim).
I decided that this situation must be remedied. To do so, I took advantage of my grocerie run to Wal-Mart last Saturday to pick up The Orange Box. For those of you who don’t know, The Orange Box is a package of games released by Valve that includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal, along with the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One. Due to the small hard drive in my aging laptop, I was only able to install HL2:Ep2 and Portal. (This left me with a measly 2GB free on my less-than-spacious 80GB hard drive.)
I had heard that Portal was a rather short game, so I decided to play it first to get my reflexes back and because it was more convenient to play after work. I found the game to be rather easy for about the first ten levels or so. The puzzles started getting harder, requiring actual thought on my part. By the time I got to the 18th level, I was so stumped that I resorted to a video walkthough to figure out what I was supposed to do. While this showed me the correct strategy, executing it was another thing entirely. I finally beat the game last night. This marked the first time ever that I beat a game without god mode or any other cheats. (I know, it’s pretty pathetic, but I just suck at gaming.) At the end was quite a treat. The ending credits were accompanied my a song written by Jonathan Coulton sung by the evil robot (GLaDOS) that you killed in the final battle. The lyrics are absolutely hysterical, but you have to play the game to really understand them.
I’ll get around to HL2:Ep2 this weekend. I hope that it is as good as Portal, because it would be a little disappointing if it wasn’t. At least I’ll know that no matter what, it will always be better than Halo, or any of its sequels, ever were.
Here’s a hilarious video review of The Orange Box that I ran across.
Note: If you have Adblock Plus, you must disable it to view this video.
Warning: This review contains coarse language.
Software Galore!
Scott Hanselman has posted his 2007 Ultimate Developer and power Users Tool List for Windows. Lots of good stuff here, some that I already use and love, other that I have yet to try but sound enticing. Goodbye productivity!
Pictures, Finally!
I finally got off of my lazy butt and moved my photo galleries over to my new site. Well… sort of. Instead of moving the galleries to my site, I instead opted to put them on Flickr.
Flickr has allowed me to do all sorts of cool stuff, such as taging the photos for easier searching and also geo-tagging them (associating a photo with a geographical position). At the same time, I’ve also put up a ton of previously unpublished photos that I have taken since 2004.
Unfortunately, since I am not hosting my own photos, I cannot skin the gallery interface to match the look of WhistlinDixie. I guess that’s just the price that I have to pay for ease-of-use.
You can visit my photo gallery using the Photos tab at the top of the page.
The addition of photo galleries to this site also marks the end of any need for my old site, Solitary Confinement. This means that it is finally time to close its doors and have it redirect right to its new home, here.
R.I.P. Solitary Confinement (3 Feb 2005 – 3 Oct 2007)