firsthour.net

My First Hour site (that yes, I’m still writing for), has officially moved to firsthour.net

It’s awesome there, trust me.  Over 50 reviews now.  Go check it out.

New Gaming Review Site: TheFirstHourBlog.com

Okay, I have a new site for real this time, actually, I’ve been updating it for the past few months. It’s called, The First Hour, and reviews only the first hour of a game. It’s gone pretty well so far as I’ve reviewed 15 total games:

God of War 2, EarthBound, Beyond Good and Evil, Indigo Prophecy, Half-Life 2, Harvest Moon, Diddy Kong Racing, Bully, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, The Curse of Monkey Island, Final Fantasy VII, Halo: Combat Evolved, Streets of Rage 2, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and Portal.

Phew! I review a new game every Monday afternoon, the next game will be the new Wii confirmed game, Okami!

New Blog Website Coming: BadEnoughDudes.com

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but I’ve been pretty busy.  For the last few months I’ve been studying for the SCJP Java 5 certification exam.  I’m taking it in less than a week and I feel like I’m almost prepared.  Anyways, the real reason I am posting is because I’m also in development of a brand new website called Bad Enough Dudes.  This website will be a collaborative blog between my friends and I, talking about video games.  It’s probably still a few months away from being ready, as we’re developing it from the ground up, but I’m pretty excited!

7th Son Book Two: Deceit

I’ve spoken of J.C. Hutchin’s great podcast novel 7th Son before, and it’s just getting better.  Book two was released this week, well, atleast the first two chapters, and it’s pretty awesome.  I would highly recommend listening to the first novel, it’s great material!

Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress

I’m a pretty huge Google guy, I love them, and that’s why I originally went to Blogger whenI wanted to start my blog. It was pretty good for a while, but I really wanted tags with my posts. I didn’t mind at first, because I was just writing about my game, but then I started writing more and more about other junk, that I wanted to be able to separate my posts. So yeah, I pretty much moved to WordPress just for tags, but I love the interface too. Yay.

The Nintendo 64: Ten Years Old

Ten years ago today, I received my Nintendo 64. I was pretty ecstatic, not as crazy as the Nintendo 64 kid, but still, pretty happy. It’s easily one of the best consoles of all time and probably my favorite one that came out in the last ten years. It had so many great games: Mario, Zelda (Majora’s Mask was better…), Harvest Moon, Star Fox, Goldeneye, Star Wars, etc. The list goes on and on, see my game collection for my favorites obviously. I have quite a keen memory when it comes to dates and video games (9/9/99, 11/23/98, etc.) so I quickly recalled that today was the day!

I hadn’t played my N64 in at least a year, I remember playing it for about an hour actually a few months ago when my sister wanted help on Super Mario 64, but besides that, it’s been a while. The time before that was probably when I played through Mischief Makers again (quite an underrated game), and the time before that was when I received my copy of Wonder Project J2. So maybe once or twice a year, unfortunately. I play my SNES far more than any other system.

But tonight I pulled my N64 out of it’s plastic tub and stuck in Super Mario 64. “It’sa me! Mario!” rang the TV, and I settled in and collected 20 stars. I had already perfected the game years ago, gettin all 120 stars and visiting Yoshi on the roof, but playing the game again brought me back ten years. To a simpler time when I was 12 years old entering the world of three dimensions. The Nintendo 64 isn’t remembered as the greatest system of all time, let alone its time by most people, but to me, it will always rest in a special place within my heart.

Audio Books and Podcasts

Over the past few months at work, well, basically the whole time I’ve worked my current job, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and audio books. I started out listening to music, that’s great and all, but I like to sing along with my music. Basically impossible at my current cubicle… So I started transitioning to more podcasts and then mostly audio books. Now I’m sure if you’re reading a blog you are well aware of the popularity of podcasts so I won’t go into that, but audio books are awesome for catching up on a bunch of books that I would never have time to read.

My first podiobook (a novel written and released in podcast fashion) was 7th Son Book One, this was a really amazing book written by J.C. Hutchins and I recommend listening to it if you’re into science-fiction or cloning or nature versus nuture or really anything because it’s a great read/listen. Book Two is supposedly being released (incrementally) in a few weeks so I’m pretty excited. However, I listened to the last book after all the chapters were released so I’m sorta used to the whole download-it-all-and-listen-to-it-immediately deal.

I then downloaded Ancestor by Scott Sigler, this was a pretty good book but I think the author was playing to the gore crowd a lot and didn’t focus enough on the amazing story he had built up. Still, well worth my time.

Then I started on audio books. Now, these are quite expensive but thanks to the internet, well, they’re not. I started out with Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. I was a pretty big fan of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons so I was excited to explore his earlier work. This novel was about cryptography and really kept my interest, though some of the parts were a little contrived (typical Dan Brown) and most of the parts were very wordy (also typical Dan Brown).

Then I listened to Deception Point, Dan Brown’s first novel. This book I could not stand. I literally cringed when I realized how much I didn’t like the story or characters and saw how many chapters remained to be listened to. This novel was incredibly wordy. All the characters were incredibly argumentative with each other. When one character would say, “I understand it all! It has to do with the micro-organisms in the sea water!” Another character would interject and argue for what seemed like five minutes an argument they had already made about 10 minutes before about how “micro-organisms in this water was an absolute impossibility” and then 15 minutes later someone would finally do a water sample and show that there were micro-organisms… well, you get the point. I would not recommend Deception Point to Da Vinci Code fans.

After finishing that drudgery, I listened to Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. This book was awesome. It’s so hard to explain and I couldn’t if I tried so just read its wikipedia entry if you’re interested. I highly recommend reading it.

Next, I listened to The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve already read the book twice and seem the great movie many times, but I heard the narrator was great so I gave it a stab. The narrator is excellent, performing all the different voices and singing all the songs and poems. I believe Peter Jackson may have even brought in actors that sounded like the narrator’s interpretation of the voices for the movie, because I could really hear Gimli or Gandalf in the book, almost like the actors were performing it. However, after seeing the movie so much, the book seems so wordy at parts, and even 10 years after originally reading it, I still don’t understand the Barrow Downs chapter.

Finally, I just finished 1984, by George Orwell today. This was a pretty good book, often heralded as the ultimate dystopian society novel, I was a little disappointed. I compare it closely to A Scanner Darkly because in both novels, you are often inside the main character’s head, listening to their stream of consciousness, which is particularly unique. However, some parts are so incredibly dull, like when Winston is reading the Goldstein book aloud, it just goes on and on and basically just repeats what the rest of the book has already covered (even Winston notes this, saying he has learned nothing new from chapter one and three). Alas, now I can say I read it (well, atleast listened to it).

Next up… either Dune or The Two Towers.

And what is up with Blogger’s horrible spell checker? It doesn’t know the word blog (not to mention podcast)?

Folding@Home 100 WUs and counting…

I have successfully folded 100 WUs for the Stanford Folding@Home project! For those not in the know, Folding@Home (f@h) is a program you run on your computer that uses your unused CPU cycles to fold proteins. It runs totally behind the scenes and doesn’t interfere with your normal computer use at all. It is similar to SETI@Home, but infinitely more practical. Instead of looking for extraterrestrial life, I’m helping to find a cure for cancer and other diseases.

I started folding mid-June when I started my new job. My work computer is a dual-core Pentium D, so I can run two different instances of the folding application at once (each one folds on its own CPU). I only fold at work for a few reasons: 1. My home computer (Athlon 1800+) is a little old and has some serious problems staying cool. 2. It costs electricity to run these processors at 100% all the time and I don’t feel like running up my electricity bill any more than what it is now. So hopefully my employer doesn’t mind…

I would highly recommend participating in the folding project if you’re interested. There’s a great community behind it all as you can join a team and do your thing together.

Here’s a picture of my 100 WU certificate!

CSS, Google Search History, and my video game collection

Well, I want to do something with my boring looking blog, spice it up a bit. So I may work on the styles a bit, but I’m just too lazy to try too hard. I’m also not very apt with colors and things, I’m more of a text guy. I’m very mathematical and like to keep track of things… like how I’ve made 5672 Google searches over the last year (I don’t keep track of that personally, don’t think I’m that much of a freak) or that I keep track of every video game I own (230 right now).

Okay… time to brainstorm colors.

About Me

This blog is pretty dull, who really wants to read that much on Ruby on Rails and some game that is on the Duke Nukem Forever timeline? Anyways, here’s a little something about me…

Born in 1984 in Wisconsin, graduated from UW-Madison in 2006 in Computer Science and East Asian Studies. I married my highschool sweetheart later that month, and now work at a major corporation in the Minneapolis area as a software engineer. I mostly program in Java on the J2EE platform and am studying for the Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) exam. However, I’m also stuck at work doing some PL/I programming on their legacy mainframe. Legacy sums it up nicely.

Anyways, I like to program, but I really love to game. Mostly classics: Chrono Trigger (my favorite game of all time), Final Fantasy series, Mario, Zelda, etc. But I love the newer games too: GTA, Halo, blah blah. I’m replaying Chrono Trigger right now (ready to beat down on Tata for stealing the Hero Medal if you’re interested), and I played through Kirby Superstar over the Labor Day weekend. I’m also currently playing FF4 (SNES) and Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams. Both very fun games, just don’t play them that much. I also like to PC game: Sims 2, Sim City series, Civilization series, umm… well I don’t play many PC games. I sit at a computer all day, I don’t like to be at one at night too much.

My wife and I watch a lot of TV on Fox, Prison Break, Vanished, House, and now Standoff it appears. She also likes American Idol and those kind of shows. We have a nice HDTV with a dual-tuner HD DVR so it gets a lot of use. Cheap Seats every night.

I think that’s enough for right now. Hope you enjoy.