Pronounce that!!!

The Colorado River - I don't know that dude.

Hoover Dam

Snapshot from the car...

It's a Super Hero Easter

Spider Man, resurrected! Praise Spider Man!

Sam's Favorite Toy (For The Moment)

Here's a picture of The Scooby-Doo Haunted Mansion Game. It's not much of a game, but it is great fun for Sam. He spends hours playing with the game pieces and creates mini-episodes of Scooby-Doo. This is the type of game I would have enjoyed as child -- many pieces and no rules.

Wednesday morning traffic Hell.

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Anti-Duck Plan

As a follow up to my picture of ducks at the pool, the apartment management has deployed these anti-duck decoys. They were convincing enough for me to do a double-take, but yesterday I did see the same pair of ducks at the other end of the pool with the decoys in place.

Robotic Mule

This video of a robotic mule is pretty amazing. It can carry 340 pounds and has amazing balance. It is kicked in the side and slips on an icy road and still maintains its balance. Its movements seem eerily human -- I was mesmerized watching how the legs move to keep balance.

Argh, you scurvy dogs!

San Juan

About a month ago I picked up San Juan. It's a card game based on the board game Puerto Rico. It's a blast, but I'm having a hard developing strategies for two-player games. I've lost to Jennifer three out of the three times we've played together. In a game with a group of four, however, I won by a ten point margin using a strategy I developed that is frustratingly useless in a two player game. I guess it's back to the drawing board. The fun thing about games is the deployment and testing of various strategies. I think that's why I'm such a fan of Puerto Rico.

Board Game Nostalgia: Code Name: Sector

Some time in the late seventies my parents bought me the board game Code Name: Sector. This was one of the earliest board games I can remember that had an on-board computer. My sisters hated it and most of the time I played the solo war option. It provided many, many geek hours of fun. The gist of the game was the computer would give you tracking coordinates of the sub and you would use a crayon to write in the locations of your ships and the enemy sub. At the end of your turn (I think -- It's been awhile!) you could fire a depth charge at one of three depths in an attempt to sink the sub. In multi-player, everyone worked together to locate the ship, but the first one to sink it won. In the solo game, you used all three ships to hunt the sub. I found this auction today. It looks in pretty bad shape and doesn't have any of the pieces. Maybe someday I'll pick it up for Sam if I can find one in great shape with all the pieces.

Video Games vs. Movie Sales

I read this earlier today and realized how huge video games are nowadays. I believe the analyst is right -- video games do have a huge impact on box office sales on release weekends. My main thought was, "Who cares?" One way or another, everyone's going to get their money. I think too much emphasis is placed on opening weekend. I think total sales is a more pertinent statistic. Also the people posting comments on Joystiq akin to, "WTF! I'll do both!" don't realize that a lot of kids are the ones buying all this crap and they tend to have a limited budget. I also find it fascinating that video games, I suspect, are becoming much more popular than movies to young people. The interactive nature of games makes this a no-brainer to me. I was always more interested in games over movies as a youth. Of course, I was always more interested in friends and skateboarding over video games.

Guitar Hero for the Commodore 64: Shredz64

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Shredz64 is a Guitar Hero style game created on the Commodore 64. The author has created a hardware interface so that a Playstation guitar can be hooked up to the C64's DB9 port. The greatest part is the game can import all the SID files on your disk into the game. Watch the video here to see it in action.

Burnout Paradise Downloadable Content

I've been enjoying Burnout Paradise on the 360 and just read about how they are going to integrate new downloadable content. They include video of a new vehicle, too.

Ducks by the pool...

Cool mother fucker

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Running to stand still...

I haven't ran in awhile so I took part of my lunch break and hit the road. Instead of wearing my GPS watch and iPod, I went minimal today wearing only a standard watch and no music. I ran for 30 minutes and didn't stop for anything and tried to keep up a relatively fast pace. I thought a lot about how fast Sam is growing up, how developed his sense of humor is even at 3 years old, and how proud I am of him and all the things he has learned in his life. Every thought brought a smile to my face.

I've been reading the latest book by Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief. It's good -- very good. This makes me very happy as I didn't really enjoy the last three Coupland books. They weren't bad; I just didn't enjoy them. Hell, it might have just been what was going on in my life at the time, who knows? I also get a double bonus for having someone check it out from the library for me. No out-of-pocket expense and my reading habits can't be traced back through some illegal type of FBI investigation. You can't be too careful -- these are strange and unique times we live in.

Lithium 24

When listening to Sirius satellite radio, I spend about 90% of the time listening to Howard Stern and 10% divided between BBC News and First Wave 22. I heard about the debut of Lithium 24 on First Wave and have been listening to it a lot since launch. Wikipedia does a better job explaining the line up better than I can, so check it out here.

The truth is, I liked Grunge and Alternative a lot in the 90's, but it wasn't my favorite. Listening to it now invokes memories of the 90's and I enjoy listening to music I haven't heard in over 10 years. It's a great channel and you should check it out if you can.