Category Archives: Video Games - Page 2

You Can’t Spell Job Without OH BOY!

Posted by on March 28, 2008 No comments

It has been a while since I’ve made a personal blog post; as has been kindly been brought to my attention.  It is because a lot of things and yet at the same time, not much had happened.  I feel confident now in having something substantial deliver to my audience.

Important things first:  I purchased Super Smash Brothers Brawl (Wii) and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (X360).  SSSB is an amazing game with a surprisingly very enjoyable single player and co-op.  I recommend it for any Wii owner.  (We even got Elizabeth to play and she seemed to be having a bit of fun once she found a character she liked.)  RSV2 is a lot like RSV1 with sprinting and a RPG aspect not unlike COD4.  The single player story is fun to play but ridiculous.

Hockey has been down right amazing.  The Gophers went on a streak to beat Mankato 2 out of 3 games that all went into over time to get into the Final Five.  The Gophers then went on to beat St. Cloud State and Colorado College to make it to the championship game.  Ultimately Denver won but The Gophers put up such an amazing effort that it is impossible to be upset.  If they continue to play this hard they have a great chance in the Frozen Four.

This past Tuesday I made crab cakes.  They were pretty good and with some tweaking they could be great.   Perhaps I’ll share the recipe if there is any interest.

I leave on my Ski Paradise vacation soon.  A whole week of water skiing in wonderfully warm and sunny weather.  It should be an absolute blast.  I only hope that my body can survive 4 sets a day for 5 days.  I leave on the 5th and come back on the 12th.

I had a slight cold this past couple of weeks, but nothing Halls cough drops couldn’t fix.

Visited the family on Easter.  Really strange when only half the family is there.

Gas is expensive ($3.10+) and influences me not to drive anymore.  I have the feeling that when I look back and read this post I will be jealous of the low price.

It appears that a lot of my favorite shows are starting to air new episodes again.  Reaper is on, South Park has been on for a while and I think the office should be coming back sometime soon.

The snow is melting and things are heating up.

I got a job.

…

Wait what?  Yup :-)  I have been offered a position at Accenture as a Consulting Analyst and I have accepted it.  The start date is May 27th.  Meaning, I’ve got a couple of months to wait.  However, as an entry level job I would be hard pressed to find anything better in this line of work.  The job will require hard work, networking and perhaps frequent travel, but at this time of my life that sounds incredibly exciting.

The last week or so I’ve spent going through the interview process.  I first was contacted by the recruiter and communicated with her.  After that it was a phone interview.  Having success in the phone interview led to an office visit.  At the office visit I had a couple of interviews and lunch with a fellow potential hire and three employees who were in our position a year or so ago.  Even though it was an interview and interviews are supposed to be huffy, I had a great time and met some very wonderful and interesting people.

I had originally been informed that I could start in April.  This date has be canceled for some unexplained reason.   My guess is that they don’t have enough new hires to warrant batching the training process.  This means I will be starting in May with all the new college graduates.  That’s fine and waiting the extra month while I live on a budget is fine.  Where things get complicated is the 2 weeks of training at Accenture’s campus in Chicago.  This will likely occur at the end of June.  Right about the time Becky and Brad get married.  I can only hope that I’m allowed to fly back, if even on my own dime for that, or that the training wraps up on Friday and we leave Friday night.  If anyone has any thoughts on this I’d be happy for any advice.  What if I’m not able to come back?  For now it’s as the old adage goes, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

I now have about 2 Months (minus vacation) to spend on a side project or catch up with friends, because once I start working I have a feeling I will fall off the face of the earth.  I kid, but seriously during the week I will be a ghost.  You will only be able to catch me on the weekends.  Weekends are pretty sacred at Accenture.   I’d be happy to share more details in person.  I don’t feel comfortable expunging details on the internet, never know who is listening.

That leaves us with today.  I’m going to be picking up the parents from the airport after their two week long cruise.  They have yet to hear about my job, so that should be good news for them.  I’ve got laundry that needs to be done and some other misc. cleaning to do in preparation, so have a great weekend everybody!

Shatter expectations and conquer the world!

Things I’m looking forward to:

  • Starting training for my Job
  • GTA4
  • Spore
  • Water Sports

Things I’m not looking forward to:

  • Juggling personal and work life
  • Commuting/Driving

Building a Computer 101: Research

Posted by on March 4, 2008 No comments

The Job posts are taking a hiatus.

I’ve been looking at building a computer more and more lately. When the Orange Box was released I was partially enticed as I wanted to play Team Fortress 2 on the PC. (I’m not a big fan of console FPS, but I manage.) Next came the official announcement of the Spore release date. I’ve also been running into issues based on how I first partitioned my drives. I originally only alloted 20gigs to the C drive. I mean come on…if I only install vital components there I should have 10 gigs of buffer space. (I’ve even allocated My Docs to a different drive.) Low and behold, 5 years later and the stupid drive has somehow managed to work its way down to 2gigs to 200mb of free space at any given time. Baring a complete wipe and reinstall, this issue is mighty difficult to fix. (If you know a way around this, I’m all ears.) The last and most recent issue is the fact that my video card is starting to go on the “fritz”. (It’s a technical term.) Since I only have AGP slots to replace the graphics card, my choices are limited. (AGP is now old tech.) All of these combined events lead me to start looking at building a new computer.

Since I’m planing to go through the process, I’d figure that I would share this journey with you. Keep in mind that each edition of this series will occur when it occurs and to be candid, the information that I present during the first couple of posts will likely become outdated by the actual build time and require me to repeat a few steps.

With that said let’s begin:

The first thing you will want to do is figure out your needs.

If you just need a computer for web browsing and word processing, then I suggest you go the laptop route. In that case our journey together ends here. I suggest you give Dell a look or any other well reviewed laptop. As I’ve never purchased a laptop and my “best” laptop is a 386+ (That’s old school folks), I’m not one to ask about laptops.

If however, your needs happen to require a desktop, a high performance desktop ;-), then you and I have something in common. You could be doing video work, photo work, playing games, developing games or anything else that requires a power hogging, heat generating beast of a machine.

If you want to do some research on your own I suggest reading HardOCP. They are an amazing and (presumably) unbiased website that reviews and details all kinds of hardware components. Within the reviews you can find benchmarks, comparisons and a bunch of well presented useful information.

Here are the basic parts you will need to research for your computer:

  • Case (Bigger allows for flexibility)
  • Power Supply
  • Mother Board
  • CPU
  • RAM
  • Hard Drive
  • DVD/CD ROM Drive

And here are the parts that we will want for our computer:

  • Video Card
  • Sound Card? (Some MoBos come with pretty good integrated sound.)
  • Multiple Hard Drives
  • TV Tuner

The list of things that have become antiquated and you probably won’t need:

  • “A” Drive (Floppy Drive)

I think I’ve listed everything that you need to build a fully functional computer. Some optional items you might be interested in are case mods, physics cards, additional cooling or even a different form of cooling (water/refrigeration). Being that my experience is limited to affixing custom fans and heatsinks using thermal paste, I won’t be covering exotic forms of cooling. (Exotic cooling is generally only necessary if you overclock or live on the surface of Mercury.)

You may be wondering why I didn’t list a monitor. Well unlike some giant chains would have you believe, you don’t need one monitor per computer. (You can use one monitor for multiple computers if you have a switch.) The computer is a separate entity from the monitor and will be selected after building the computer. This is an especially good idea because some video cards only have certain types of output or can handle only certain levels of resolution. Your monitor and your video card need to coexist in blissful harmony. Trust me, choose a monitor after you have ordered the parts for your computer.

In the next post I will detail the exact parts that I have selected if I were to build a computer tomorrow. It’s important to know this even if you plan to build many months out. It gets you in the practice of researching and might clue you in to any possible future breakthroughs that you should wait for. More on that tomorrow!

The Pre-Christmas Warm Up

Posted by on December 24, 2007 No comments

If you haven’t noticed, it’s been a few days since I’ve last posted.  A very influential reader informed me that it would be best if I did so again.

I feel I can not be blamed for the passing of time and of the rate at which it travels.  To me the past few days have blended into one giant super day.  It is mostly the effect of a multi day graduation celebration.  A number of us made trips to Minneapolis (or stayed there since some live there) and we got our “party on” as the kids (ha!) say these days.  Greg found it in his infinite wisdom to purchase a Breathalyzer.  We turned it into a game of sorts and were certainly surprised by the results.  The most interesting part of the night occurred when JJ while playing wingman happened to be the only one to come out “victorious”.  JJ ended up staying and chatting with the girl when the rest of us decided to get out of his hair and head to KHK to see Quigley.  He was a wonderful host but that doesn’t change the fact that my desk is better than his.  Afterwards we stopped at the lovely Burrito Loco to get some food.  Back at Chops’ place Greg and Elizabeth quickly slipped off to dreamland after finishing their Loco. They were the top players in the Breathalyzer Olympics.  Elizabeth being the winner with a BAC of .21.  Chops and I entertained ourselves by making a video of JJ’s empty room and then watched TV while we waited for JJ to return.  JJ showed up in short notice to inform us of the anticlimactic end to his evening.  Unsurprisingly the girl was not JJ’s type and who could blame him?  It’s not that he didn’t have the chance to make things happen, it’s just he is a better guy than that.  Still, it was something out of the usual and that is always a good time.   That was pretty much the end of that evening.

Saturday was quality time with Elizabeth.  We just relaxed the whole day together.  Moments like that are far and few between.  It is wonderful when we get to enjoy each others company alone for so long.  It had rained the previous evening and sequentially dropped back below freezing so I had to veraciously scrape off my car.  The roads were pretty nightmarish when driving Elizabeth back home.  Capped off the evening with some COD4 and some ranked doubles in Halo3 with JJ.  We pretty much rocked everyone we played by a good measure.

My effort to go to sleep early last night failed.  (I blame myself, although JJ could hold a close second.)  Which in turn threw my plans to wake up early and finish my Christmas Shopping into blarney.  (English references ftw!)  Woke up around 4:00pm.  Found, to my wonderful surprise, that my parents had cleared out the middle stall of the garage so that it could now be used to berth a car like it was intended.  Thus, scrapping ice from my car as previously detailed has come to an end.  It was with good timing as today we were hit by a good dose of snow and wind.  So at around 5:00pm I headed out into the storm to finish my Cristmas shopping.  I still had my sister, Secret Santa and few more items to purchase for Elizabeth.  I headed over to W******* L**** and W**-M*** to make my purchases.  I was lucky I had woken up so early (</sarcasm>) because W******* L**** was closing at 6:00pm.  I stopped in 3 different stores and was able to pick up some gifts for my sister and Elizabeth.  With still a few things in mind I headed off to W**-M***, the store that never closes.  I was able to pick up the remainder of my gifts for all three people.  Total time was 40mins for that shopping trip.  Given the terrible driving conditions and the amount of walking between stores I must stay that I deserve some kind of medal.  The only demerit I deserve was forgetting a battery for the garage remote.  A23 battery?  Honestly, what the crap kind of battery is that.

I must reiterate that people are terrible drivers.  You live in Minnesota.  It’s going to snow.  It kind of happens every year.  Long term memory exist for a reason!  Remove head from arse!

Able to rest having completed all my shopping I spent some quality time with the parents.  We prepared for the family Christmas Eve party while Discovery Channel was on in the background.  (A cool show about a couple living with Wolves in Idaho.)  My Dad helped prep the Turkey, my Mom made the stuffing and I made the Chex Mix.  I had to improvise a bit because of the size of the batch we were making but it turned out well.  (Kind of hard to screw up.)  When we were done cooking and the show about the wolves was over we switched it over to Comedy Central where we watched Trading Places.  As the night drew to a close and the show was over, I retreated to the basement for some COD4 with Chad.  We tried to get JJ to play with us, but he his home for the holidays and doesn’t have the mechanical means to connect to Xbox live.

And now we come to the present hour and find me wrapping up this post with a cliche conclusion.  I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas Eve and if you are having a party, party in moderation.  Enjoy the holiday season and be safe on the roads.  Merry Chirstmas everyone.

“9 minutes”

Posted by on December 13, 2007 1 comment

Justin warned me today that I was within 9 minutes of not posting everyday. This would bring the streak that I was trying to establish to a grinding halt after only 2 days. Of course one could technically say that I missed the deadline, but I prefer to think otherwise. Much like many businesses do not follow the calendar year when it comes to their fiscal year, I do not follow the standard day. My day ends when I go to sleep. If this means I end up with 48 hour days, then so be it. So I say that my day has now concluded and I can now post in detail the events of my day.

It was part two of the review extravaganza that began yesterday. Not a whole lot of exciting things happened. Moving on…I stopped at the liquor store and picked up some Winter Bourbon Ale. It is brewed apparently by Anheuser-Busch, which absolutely blew my mind because it was a very good beer. Played a lot of Halo over at Chops’ and JJ’s. Chops and I were celebrating our last day of classes ever. (At least as an undergraduate.) We decided to make a run to Target after a couple of hours. At Target I successfully, along with Chops, talked JJ into buying Call of Duty 4 (A spectacular game.) Thus causing JJ to spend more money and succumb to peer pressure. I was a little greedy and bought myself something off my wish list. I purchased a new Xbox 360 controller along with a rechargeable battery pack. Chops bought a fancy 4 slot toaster along with a DVD set of all 4 Tremors movies. (The fact that there were 4 shocked me.) We headed back to their place for more Halo action; where I strong armed them into testing my map. (It still has bugs!) Afterwards we went out to Blarney’s for cheap wings and cheap beer. I purchased a couple pints of Guinness along with 24 wings. (I’m sure I will regret this later tonight when the wings finish their job.) $9 later and an hour or so we were headed back home. Casey was nice enough to be the sober cab and drive us. There was some more Halo action (read: Lots), and then it was time for folks to go to bed and go home. (That’d be me. And it was like 3 hours later.) Tomorrow is looking to be a poker night. I can only hope to get yet another 2nd place. I seem to finish second place in every tournament partake in. I have terrible luck when it comes to cards but I can usually win when it comes to a battle of wills and wits.

So my computer just started making very odd noises. I guess that means it is time to stop, good night all. And yes, I think this counts towards continuous posts since on a 24hr cycle I am well within the time limit. ;-P