Metal Business Cards

Metal Business Cards (site)

They are just too cool not to mention.

Stuck on Broadway music is up.

www.myspace.com/stuckonbroadway (site)

So check-check it out.

Commence the Best Summer Ever!

The Best Summer Ever has now officially started. Anything that you (or I) do could be eligible for scoring points towards the project, so make sure that when you do a mission that you bring a camera with to document it and then post the pics on your blog.

I have posted 10 more missions so the total is up to 65 now, so there is a wide variety of stuff to choose from.
First up for me is to work on painting some models.

Rock, rock on.

The Big Red One comes back to Ft. Riely

The Manhattan Mercury

After an absence of nearly 10 years, the colors of the 1st Infantry Division will return to Fort Riley under a Pentagon recommendation made public as part of the BRAC process today.
The move could raise troop numbers on post above 17,000 in the next few years.

Good deal, I know that a lot of the city leaders were hopping that Ft. Riley would get the division back. It should help the local economy some, although it's not like we really need any help.

How to simplify your life in 2005

Sound Money Tips (blargticle)

Tip 3: Make sure you're not always-on. If you have a cell phone, pager or mobile email device, make sure you switch it off for a portion of each day. You don't need to be "always on". In particular, turn off electronic devices when you are with family members.

I am all about simplifying my life. So here are 5 tips to simplify life. The only one that I don't agree with totally is tip 5 that says to cancel Cable TV and get a movie subscription service. They reason they say to do it is so that you are in control of what you watch.... but as long as you don't just sit down in front of the TV and see what is on, you will never be tricked into watching something. How do you avoid watching pointless shows? Before you turn on the TV check on TitianTV to see if anything good is on, if not don't bother turning on the TV.

10 more for BSE

I have posted 10 more missions for the Best Summer Ever. the total is up to 55 now. Check ‘em out.

I would stay up and post more missions, but the stupid low battery beeping of the smoke detector is driving me insane. Seriously, I just want to rip it off the ceiling and punt it across the yard. It is so stupid that I can't change the battery in it.

A brief note (GameSpy inflates rating)

operation: drumbeat (blargticle)

"I’ve never done this before, and I probably shouldn’t be doing it now, but I want to take the opportunity to completely disown the GameSpy Donkey Konga 2 review in its published form. It grew an extra star and a half (or another 30% on the gamerankings scale) from its submitted version, along with several laudatory phrases that I didn’t write and certainly don’t mean. I hated the game. It’s not a 3/5.

Wow, that is pretty major news. GameSpy inflated a rating, which really discredits the site as a place to go to get useful game reviews. Because there is no way to know if the review is the actual review or not. Hopefully someone will have a follow-up for this.

The Xbox 360

Kotaku (article)

Xbox 360 is unveiled:

The console will come with a wireless controller, a small removable 20 GB hard drive and built-in HD DVD playback. You will also be able to buy a digital camera, a WiFi adapter and up to three more wireless controllers for the console.
As we heard at the Game Developers Conference, the biggest thing about the Xbox 360 in Microsoft’s eyes is that it will be entirely high-definition.
The console will also have 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM operating at 700 MHz. The systems overall floating-point performance will be 1 teraflop.
It’s hard to compare the current Xbox to the 360, but Rob Smith, editor-in-chief of Official Xbox Magazine, said they certainly tried. The magazine handed the specs over to Maximum PC editors and had them crunch the numbers.
“The bottom line was, between the GPU format and cores, and 512 memory, the Xbox 360 will be significantly faster than the fastest PC,” he said.

So it looks like this will be a cheap awesome PC... if it can get hacked, and as we have seen it shouldn't take too long to get some useful hacks on it. But what is really interesting to me is:

“Even if you don’t have high-def, the games are still going to look better on an Xbox 360 then any other system because of Xbox 360’s raw graphics power, but the pinnacle experiences are going to be on high-def.”
Henshaw said he thinks the 360 will likely spur a clamor for high-def TVs.
“Our game developing partners and retail partners are actually looking for this product to be the catalyst to help drive industry wide adoption of high-def.”

I also agree with this. I am in the market for a new TV, and I had not been considering an HD TV until I thought about buying a next gen system. And really, I think it would be a waste of money not to jump on over and get an HD TV, especially since it looks like we are getting in to an era where it will be useful to have.

The console will also be always online and make use of built in Media Center Extender for Windows XP, allowing you to connect to your PC and other multimedia devices.
You can connect the 360 to your home network with a cable, or buy a small WiFi adapter for wireless connectivity.
Henshaw said you can use your own WiFi adapter or buy one that fits smoothly into the 360, without messing with its sleek design.
Once the console is hooked up, the 360 will be able to play music, videos and display pictures from your computer on your television. You will also be able to connect MP3 players and digital cameras directly to the 360 with a USB cord and then stream the music or check out your pictures on your TV.

This is setting the bar pretty high for PS3. It is amazing how much things improve with each console generation. Think about just the jump from PSOne to PS2, now we are doing it all over again, amazing.

Xbox Live will come in two flavors. All 360’s will come with Xbox Live Silver for free, while Xbox Live Gold will require a subscription. (Your current Xbox Live subscription will transfer over seamlessly.)
Silver will let you play games online on weekends, but not during the week and will let you track and chat with friends online. You can also access a marketplace to purchase games and download demos through the Silver edition.

Freakin’ awesome. I am glad that XBox Live is part of the package for free, even if it is limited. I wonder if the weekend is Sat and Sunday, or like Friday night to Sunday afternoon... for the sake of awesomeness I hope it starts on Friday night.

Well, it looks like the next gen consoles are well on there way to being something that i really want. I will be looking forward to seeing what Sony has for us, and I really want to see what Nintendo is going to do since they look like the odd man out. Next week is E3, so all (or some) questions will be answered there.

Oh, go to go Attack of the Show is about to start. ^_^

Bit 'o Garden City News.

Holcomb agrees to negotiate

Holcomb city councilmen Wednesday moved a step closer to having Garden City take over fire services in Holcomb.
The council agreed to enter into contract negotiations with Garden City after talking with Fire Chief Allen Shelton at the meeting. Shelton proposed Holcomb pay $47,148 to the Garden City Fire Department, which includes $36,748 for salaries of two full-time firefighters to staff the Holcomb Fire Station and $10,400 for administrative services, fuel and the additional work.

Holcomb takes one step closer to being an official suburb of Garden. Come, come, Holcomb, you will like being our suburb. :)

Twisters do little damage

Jones said spotters saw a funnel cloud form about six miles southwest of Garden City that did not touch down, followed by a second one that did touch down about four miles southwest of the city. Warning sirens were sounded both times at 10:24 and 10:31 Wednesday night.
Mark Robinson of Toronto said he came down on vacation time to check out the storms with others from New York and Florida and saw others from locations as varied as Oklahoma to England.
"I think every other chaser in the world was in Garden City last night," he said.

One thing that I don't like about Manhattan is that it takes too long to get out to a spot where you can see the horizon, so when there are possibilities for tornadoes I have almost a closterphobic feeling. I just want to see what in the storm is moving where. That is why I think it would be hard for me to move somewhere where there are alot of trees. I really like storms, and it bothers me when I can not see what they are doing.

Since Jenette and Chris need to get their oil changed as well we all headed over to Walsmart after the Chipotle fest. We looked at the Star Wars toys for a while, and I could help but take a picture of the Chewbacca* with his ‘Wookiee Rage!’. While we were in the store it started to rain heavily, and after our cars were done we got pretty wet running out to get in them. Fun. Now I am just sitting back listening to the rain, and chilling the most.

*Chewbacca is in the dictionary for Word. How is that for a fun fact of the day?

Today I woke up to the bug inspectors. After letting them roam around for a bit, I got ready and was about to head out to get the oil changed in my car when Chris asked something on messenger... I don’t remember what it was, but it lead to going to grab some food at Chipotle with them. (well actually I asked if they wanted to go, so I guess they came with me... anyways...) While we were eating a storm rolled in (the same one that hailed in Junction). For a bit the storm looked pretty evil. This picture is when the storm started to come in.

After doing other things, Nicole took up the rest of last night by working on her paper, so I ran away to do something more fun... such as go play at Aaron’s house.
We played tennis on the PS2 (funner than it sounds), and watched a rugby and a soccer match. The rugby game was great fun and it reminded me why I think it sound be one of the big four sports (along with football, lacrosse, and hockey). I ended up getting home around 5. :)

Ok to catch up on the pictures, I give you the past day, in pictures:
First up is Coco Bolo’s. Last night Nicole was hungry so we rounded a pose up and went on down there to eat. As usual the wait was long and the food was good. Something to comment on was the tiramisu. Jenette and Chris weren’t hungry so they just split it, and man was that some good stuff. If Coco Bolo’s has it next time, I have to get it.

(Aaron seems to not like pictures. ^_^ )

Hand Gestures Linked To Better Speaking

Science Daily (article)

Why does Nicole's grandpa tell such great stories?

"What we think is going on here," Nicoladis said, "is that the very fact of moving your hands around helps you recall parts of the story--the gestures help you access memory and language so that you can tell more of the story."

Maybe that’s why.

Was World War II worth it?

WorldNetDaily (article)

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

Ummmm... we didn't really care if the Germans were killing Germans. What we did care abiut was that Germany was eating all the Europeans countries. Britain was on the verge of falling. So we fought the Europeans from to save Brittan and France, not to liberate the German people. (Only later in the war did we find out that the Jews were being killed.)

This article starts off good, talking about how the USSR killed many people, so we didn't really win anything during WWII, since one killer was replaced by another. But for the most part, we are fine with nations killing themselves, as long as they don't invade other countries. And when USSR covertly invaded other countries is when the Cold War started.

I donno, the article is a good read, but in the end I think it is wrong.