I had planned on writing a line or 2 about Brett Favre’s retirement and the passing of Gary Gygax, but it’s all old news now. Not to mention that I thought that my Bro-in-Law did a pretty good job of covering both events. OK so almost everyone knows who Brett Favre is, but I think Gary Gygax flew a little more under the radar of the general public. For those of you not in the know, Gary Gygax was one of the co-creaters of a little table-top game called Dungeons & Dragons .

• My Dad’s Birthday
• Valentine’s Day
• Brian’s Birthday
• Our Wedding Anniversary
• Amy’s Birthday

Oh, and you can throw my little sister’s birthday in there as well….

Anyhoo, back to the subject at hand. I am brand new to the whole Guitar Hero franchise, though I’ve been wanting to play it since the first one came out(this is the first version that is available for the Wii). So, being wet behind the ears, I decided to wuss out and start the game on easy. The game has a great song list that can be played in four modes: Easy-utilizes only 3 of the five finger buttons, Medium -adds more notes to the note chart and includes a fourth button, Hard-includes the fifth button and the note combinations are harder still, Expert-just insanely fast note combinations and lots of advanced techniques. See here for a more thorough rundown of the game.

It took some time to get used to the controller, but once I got the hang of it, I cruised through the first 2 concerts with no problems. In fact, I finished the whole game on easy in less than 1 week… scoring at least four or five (out of five) stars on each song(but one… more on that later)!(*patting self on shoulder*) Medium difficulty is a completely different story however. I find myself practicing a song over and over and I can barely get 4 stars on most of them. Strange how adding just one more button to a note chart just changes the whole complexity of a song.

Speaking of complex songs… Slayer’s Raining Blood is one of the songs you can choose to play in the last set of the game. OMG!!! Even on easy, I got booed off of the stage 3 or 4 times before completing it with only 3 stars. The song is just wicked hard and pretty fast. I haven’t even tried it on medium… and probably won’t. the other 3 songs on the set(you need to complete 3 out of 4 songs in the set to advance) are just easier for me to play.

The boys have watched me play the early parts of the game and both have taken an interest in playing it. I let them both play through the tutorial, and though both of them completed it, Will seemed to have a tougher time since his little fingers are having troubles spanning the 3 buttons needed to play in easy mode. But, he fought through A LOT of frustration and continued to practice the songs in the first set…. and as of this past weekend, he had completed both the first and second sets on easy. I have to say that I was quite proud of his determination. He never gave up even though I saw times where he stomped off crying in frustration, and others when he looked ready to throw the guitar controller into the TV. To see him pass the first few songs after all of the practice. The look on his face was worth it.

I’m not sure how much further in the game I am going to let him go. The last few parts of the game are more mature themed than I think he should be a part of. The final stage is actually in Hell and you have to play “Devil went down to Georgia” against a caricature of the red man himself in order to complete the game. I’ll probably end up letting him play up to set 6 or so and then have him move up to the next level. I just think that some of that stuff might frighten him a little.
[tags]holidays, GH3, wii[/tags]

**Crossing my fingers that I can stay healthy during this winter**

[tags]weather, winter, cold[/tags]

Anyway, A few days back, a couple of my co-workers(Thanks Jamie and Philip!) sent me a link to this wonderfully entertaining video of a men’s a cappella group called Straight, No Chaser singing The 12 Days of Christmas. I figured that since I was so into the Christmas spirit and truly love a capella harmonies, that I’d share with you guys as well. Enjoy!

[tags]Straight no Chaser, music, a capella, Christmas, holidays[/tags]

I now have the whole family using the linux partition as their workspace. I also set it up where linux would mount my Windows partition so we could have a separate repository for media(pictures and videos) that can be accessbile from either OS. That way, depending on what OS is up at the time, we could use F-Spot to import pictures in Linux, and Picasa to do it in Windows, and it would import them all to the same place. In the future, I plan to resize my Linux partition, and create a dedicated FAT32 partition just for shared media. Anyway, click the link below to look at all the parts and how I built my PC…. The one thing I forgot to do is take a picture of the whole setup once I was done, but hey… I’m not perfect.

PC Components

[tags]pc, build, ubuntu, windows[/tags]

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A couple of notes:

1. Wow does Windows load up fast!
2. After loading up all of the needed drivers, I re-installed Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and turned the graphic settings all the way up… simply beautiful!
3. I’m really digging this new heatsink. It was HUGE and a pain to install, but in combination with the fans in my case, it is keeping my new quad-core CPU a very cool 25° C.
4. The PC is much quieter than my old one.
5. 32-bit Windows isn’t able to utilize 4 GB of memory. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get my hands on a 64-bit version. No real matter. I plan to be working in Linux mostly anyway.

I did take a number of pictures that i will import in shortly. I know it’s really geeky, but hey, that’s how I roll…
[tags]windows, pc, games[/tags]

Now all that is left is to install the video card, make sure my BIOS settings are correct, and install the operating systems and device drivers for each…. That should do it.

I’m stoked again. I quit playing games like Oblivion or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter because they were just too sluggish on my old setup. In fact, I couldn’t play Ghost Recon after a while because of all the graphic artifacts and tearing that I used to experience. Now I’ll get to see these games again in a brand new light. I really can’t wait to get home!

Oh, I have a question. If my order was set to ship on UPS 3-day select service, and the order didn’t arrive until the fourth day, what happens? Do I get some sort of credit, or a check? I tried to look for an answer on UPS.com, but didn’t really find anything.

[tags]games, pc, ups, delivery[/tags]