Hint: There are more than two shirts...

If you're looking for something to get me for Christmas, look no further than these two shirts.

Either one would be acceptable.

I need the money raised by my awesome shirt-wearing campaign to fix my car :)

25 years of videogames in 2 1/2 minutes

This is a pretty cool little video that does what my title says.

My only real beef is that they include some pre-rendered cinematics in the mix as being indicative of actual gameplay, but give it a couple of years and those WILL be actual gameplay videos.



I'll try to post something non-video-like in a day or two when I catch my breath. I'm just now getting over a nasty cold/flu thing and between Garrett & work, I've barely had a chance to turn on a game system, let alone think up a witty blog post!

It's Tuesday And That Means It's Viking Invasion Day!

Here's an oldie but a goodie.

I Can Think Of A Few Uses For This

I'm sorry. I just had to post this picture.



I know of a few people I'd like to introduce to the business end of this thing...

*Brock glares at his neighbours*

Less Talk, More Rokk

We had a Guitar Hero 2 party here at my place tonight. Talk about fun.

The best thing about Guitar Hero 2 over the original is that you can play co-op. I played lead guitar on most of the songs and Codeboy played rhythm or bass guitar. Some of the songs have a harder bassline than they do lead!

The other improvement is that each player can select different difficulty levels. This way I could work on the songs on Hard mode while Codey did his stuff on Medium. Much fun was had.

Artist's Conception Of Codeboy playing Freebird


So much fun, in fact, that we broke the PS2. Well, not really, but it locked up when we were 3/4's of the way through Freebird. Freebird is the final song in the game and is just insane once it gets going into the 400 concurrent guitar solos. We must have just exuded too much awesomeness for the game and it just locked up. Oh well. We'll attempt it again at a later date.

Our New Kid Must Be Part Cylon

Julie's starting to scare me. She's suffering from some kind of pregnancy dementia that is turning her into far too much of a nerdling for her own good. I've had several conversations with her about the PS3 launch, which is pretty scary on its own. Heck, the other day I actually stopped mid-sentence and said, "Wait a minute. This is the kind of thing I babble on about with the guys at EB or on Evil Avatar, not with you. What's going on?!"

I also had funny exchange with her tonight.
I was playing some Final Fantasy XII and had hopped on a Chocobo.



This is a chocobo, by the way...

Anyway, I stopped for a second and pointed to the screen and said, "Hey, what's that thing called?"

Julie thought for a minute and then said, "Hmm... A chocobo?" That surprised her almost as much as it surprised me. I told her she was right and she said, "No way! I just pulled that name out of the air." Then she mumbled about spending too much time around me...

Of course, that's when I knew that our kid must be a Cylon hybrid. It's the only explanation.

Why Does This Video Remind Me Of James? :)

Weird Al has a new video up on der interweb.

Oh, James is going to kill me.

I think this is almost as funny as the White & Nerdy video... I'm torn between which I like more.

Crazy Survey

I just did a survey that had some really weird questions on it.

Here's an actual question with the actual responses available.

Which of the following would you rather do then go holiday shopping at the mall during the holiday season?
(Select all that apply)
Spend a weekend with the in laws
Shave my head
Have a root-canal at the dentist
Complete your income tax return
Get punched in the nose
None of the above

Yeesh! The question before that asked if I did any online shopping in my PJ's, an evening gown or in the nude. Do I even want to know what that data will be used for?

Vote or Else!

Don't forget to vote for your Mayor and/or town snow-shovel repairman today.

If you don't, I'll send Garrett to your place.

Oh, and if you do vote, I'll let you watch the Simpson's Movie Trailer.

It's Never Too Early... For A Salad!

This is a really cool interview from a year or so ago with Don LaFontaine. Who's he? He's the ubiquitous voiceover guy that does all the trailers and promos. It's neat to finally put a face and name to the voice.

Bang Head Here

So today I went in for round two of me vs. the idiots at Cogeco.

Like I said yesterday, we got our digital cable box yesterday and it's pretty sweet. House and the Rick Mercer Report in HD are gorgeous and it's nice to have G4 to toss on the telly whenever there's nothing else to watch.

That said, I was a little disconcerted yesterday when I realized that my VCR will only tape whatever is on the receiver. Ie. I can't set it to tape Corner Gas and then watch Prison Break at the same time. So I decided to call Cogeco up and see if there was a way to go around this or if I could just plug my cable directly into the VCR and have a separate feed to the digital box (which looks to be the way to go).

These guys are idiots. I'm sorry, but I can't say it any nicer than that. I asked the guy in the sales/accounts office if he knew of a workaround and he thought there might be one so he tossed me over to the tech department. Fine. I can understand the guys in the sales office not knowing what to do.

The guy in tech support was a different story altogether though. First off, it took me a little bit of time to explain exactly what the problem was. Then he tried to say, "Look, we don't service VCR's so I can't tell you anything." I explained to him that I don't need him to tell me how to set up my VCR. I just need to know if it is even possible to tape something on the VCR while watching a different channel on the receiver.

At this query I get a gem of a response. "Hey man. I don't even have a digital box. This is outside the area of my expertise."

To which my brain starts to scream, "WHAT THE HECK DO YOU MEAN IT'S OUTSIDE THE AREA OF YOUR EXPERTISE? I don't care if you don't have a digital box at home. You WORK doing TECH SUPPORT for a DIGITAL CABLE COMPANY! I don't take the various meds I distribute at the group home but that doesn't mean I don't know what they do! AAAAARG!!!"

Thankfully my mouth just said, "Is there anyone there who might have a clue as to how to go about doing this?" (said in a tone dripping in barely contained rage...)

The guy went away for about 30 seconds and came back to say, "One of my co-workers thinks there might be a way to do it, but he's not sure. Sorry!"

Sigh. We decided to poke around online and lo and behold, we were able to find directions ON THE COGECO WEBSITE on how to do this workaround. Man... The people in the accounts department are quite nice. The tech people scare me though. If I, someone who has been exposed to HD and digital cable technology for only a few days can brainstorm and figure out a way to do this workaround and then find it a few minutes later on their website, shouldn't someone who's being paid to actually help the less technical amongst us be able to at least offer some suggestions?

I understand that they can't really tell me, possible idiot consumer #2980, what to do with items they don't service. However, they could have at least pointed me towards the schematics on their own website. Heck, what I was asking for didn't even involve me asking them to set up my VCR... I just wanted to run cable into it and didn't know if that would be a bad thing or not.

Sigh. Bunch of morons.

Guitar Hero With Consummate V's

Well, today was quite a day. I ended up making about 3 trips to Milton due to various EB related weirdness. Thankfully my day ended with me in possession of Guitar Hero 2.

WOO!

Sadly, the wireless controller wasn't in... nor does it seem to be in anytime soon. The website says Nov. 28 while the in-store computer says it won't be in until sometime in January '07.

That said, man, is it ever fun. I've played through most of the songs on Easy but, well, they're easy. I tried one or two songs on Medium and it's noticeably more difficult. Of course, now that I've unlocked Trogdor by the almighty Strong Bad, I don't need to unlock any more songs...

Although I am having more fun with Cherry Pie than I should... I need a big wig and some ripped jeans.

Ah, this vacation is turning out pretty good. Aside from the crippling back pain that I had from first thing Monday morning until about mid-afternoon today, that is...

But yeah. I've been watching movies, playing games and generally relaxing. Niiiiice.

Cogeco? More like Stupidco.

Wow. I just got my Digital HD Cable receiver today. I called for it, oh, LAST SATURDAY (the 28th!) and should have had it by about the first last week. I won't get into all the sorry details, but I tell ya, it wasn't pretty.

They had the wrong address for here. Then when they finally sent it to me, they didn't bother to put a street address on the package. THEN they sent me the wrong receiver. I was talking to the guy today about the possible location of my receiver and lo and behold, not one, but TWO HD receivers arrived. Sigh.

What really boggled my mind was the fact that people I was talking to didn't seem to know the difference between RCA cables and component. And I'm talking about the people who do the work on the actual boxes. Sigh. How do you get a job working on High Definition TV services without learning about what a component cable is? Sigh.

That said, ooooooh baby. I love it. We've got a bunch of HD channels (Discovery HD is so gorgeous you almost feel like you're going to fall into the TV!) and I now have G4 TechTV. I used to dream of the day that I'd get TechTV on my TV but now they've almost neutered it of all the good game and tech related goodness. Thankfully the Canadian version of the channel still has some good shows like Call for Help and the various Vic & Tommy game shows. In the states they've gotten rid of most of the game shows and replaced them with drift racing shows and repeats of Star Trek: TNG. Yippedy doo.

Don't Drink The CoChicken!

This is just awesome.



Of course, there are a bunch of other ones, like the Coke & Chicken, a rake handle and how to turn ice into snow.

Take that, Maclean's!

How Do They Make Them Walk The Plank?

Next time you're sitting around, downloading the latest Hollywood movie or crappy song, think about what you're doing to those who depend on your money for rocket sauce for their rock and/or roll.

Ah, I'll just let Jack Black explain it.

Oh, and I'm up at this ungodly hour because one of my co-workers got the call that his wife was in labour and I zipped over to work at around 1:45am for an hour or so to bail him out till reinforcements arrived to let me come home. Sigh. I think this happens every time I take vacation... Stupid childbirth.