Detroit Lions releases....

Detroit recently release Kevin Jones and Kalimba Edwards. To be honest, I agree with Tom's assessment on Kevin. I think he is a great player but the moneyed owed for a player that has been frequently injured is something the Lions can't pay for especially on the final year of a contract. I agree that Kevin will be a phenomenal player. I really hope that the Lions can resign him with a back loaded contract that would bring him back with money to match the amount of games he will be available for this year.

As for Kalimba, best of luck, but I am not sad to see that position get freed up for a replacement. Maybe a move to OLB in a 3-4 will be a better move for him.

Update on life

Well, it seems we are mostly back to healthy in the household. The time change made it a little more difficult to get better as it totally screwed with sleep. Plus I think I broken my NyQuil addiction as well. Seems every time I get a cold, I turn to NyQuil to make sure I get my rest just cause it does a good job opening the airways and then making me drowsy. However, after I feel the cold has run it's course, I have to somehow back down from it, which means the first few nights off tend to be me laying in bed till midnight waiting for sleep. Usually I try to go off of the stuff on a weekend, but this time it wasn't possible. Either way, I survived the low sleep and now and back to good.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I hear that 30 is one of the special birthdays that you should celebrate. I guess I missed it. We'll try again in 10 years. But the cold was a mixed blessing, it gave me the chance to spend more time with parents who were in town to see us as I didn't lose the commute, just spent part of the holed up working from home.

Book Review: Time Enough for Love

I recently completed Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein. Time Enough for Love tells the furthering stories of Lazarus Long aka Woodrow Wilson Smith and his continuing life. At this point in the story (4700 AD), Lazarus has been alive 2700 years and done just about everything. As such he wants to end it gracefully in a run down hotel across town. Things don't go so well as the Howard families refuse to let their key piece of genetics and information die and have resolved to try and find things in life to get Lazarus interested again in living, but the real underlying theme is around love is what makes life worth living.

This book is broken into 4 sections that have their own distinctive feel. Part 1 seems to be a lot of pontification by Heinlein as the members of the Howard families attempt to get something new for Lazarus. Here you are introduced to a planet leader who can be as manipulative as they come, a computer in love with said leader, as well as a couple of lonely rejuvenators. They worry about Lazarus. They talk of manipulating him. They speak with him, trying to get him to share many of his stories from his long life.

Part 2 has involves Lazarus telling two stories to the computer, Minerva, about his past loves and trying to explain what love is. I found these sections to be much more enjoyable than his random pontifications. Heinlein is able to create interesting characters in very interesting scenes when he actually sits to tell a story.

Part 3 suddenly appears and takes you forward 5 or 10 years. Here again we find ourselves subject to Heinlein's discussions of group marriages and love again. We hear his ideas on raising children and creating happy healthy family units.

Finally in Part 4, we take a look at Lazarus' past through the eyes of an aged Lazarus and how he gets to meet his first family again but as another person via ways of time travel. This he is able to paint another good story of a person really looking out for his skin so much that he again forgets that life is about living and loving and that he has to rediscover that through his family and the ones he cares about most.

Overall a good book, but dreadfully long and over tedious in places. Recommended to the die hard RAH fan. Everyone else need not apply.

The Magical Age

I think we have reached a very neat age for Miranda. She seems to be comprehending more of what is going on. Cause and effect understanding seems to be getting better (very crucial in making sure that bad behavior is curbed). Plus she is starting to talk. Her language is not easily translated to english so I have lots of trouble understanding her.

So in the last month, we have had a potty use, which is good, but now she doesn't even want to go near it. Our bath times are getting a little easier. She still doesn't like to get her hair wash, but now it is more of anger as opposed to the straight out screaming her head off. She is not kicking the cat now, which I count as a huge win.

Some of the bad is that she has figured out how the TV works (at least turning it on). She still throws food on the floor and we can't take the food away yet as we are still trying to get some more weight on her. We go through daily tantrums over nap and bed. Cleaning is hard as she still won't put things away and loves to haul out what we put away.

So overall, nothing terrible and many things very cool so she is progressing well and we as parents are a little bit calmer than we were before.

Happy Valentines Day

And no, I didn't buy the flowers.

Download the songs of Rock Band

Since I have been playing Rock Band for the xbox 360, I have wanted to download the MP3's so that I can listen to the music and figure out the pitch of the singing or even just learn the songs so it is easier to play. I figured others would care about my work.

But here is the complete list of the ones I could find on Amazon.

• Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter"
• "Train Kept a Rollin'™" (Album only download)
• "Won't Get Fooled Again" (not The Who)
• Boston "Foreplay/Long Time"
• Mountain "Mississippi Queen"
• The Police "Next to You"
• David Bowie "Suffragette City"
• Black Sabbath "Paranoid"
• Blue Oyster Cult "Don't Fear the Reaper"
• The Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop"
• Deep Purple "Highway Star"
• KISS "Detroit Rock City"
• Molly Hatchet "Flirtin'™ With Disaster"
• The Outlaws "Green Grass and High Tides"
• Sweet "Ballroom Blitz"
• Rush "Tom Sawyer"
• Bon Jovi "Wanted Dead or Alive"
• The Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go"
• Faith No More "Epic"
• Pixies "Wave of Mutilation"
• R.E.M. "Orange Crush"
• Iron Maiden "Run to the Hills"
• Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly"
• Metallica "Enter Sandman"
• Nirvana "In Bloom"
• Stone Temple Pilots "Vasoline"
• Weezer "Say It Ain't So"
• Smashing Pumpkins "Cherub Rock"
• Radiohead "Creep"
• Beastie Boys "Sabotage"
• Hole "Celebrity Skin"
• Garbage "I Think I'm Paranoid"
• Soundgarden "Black Hole Sun"
• The Hives "Main Offender"
• Queens of the Stone Age "Go With the Flow"
• The Strokes "Reptilia"
• JET "Are You Going To Be My Girl"
• Ok Go! "Here It Goes Again"
• Nine Inch Nails "The Hand That Feeds"
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Maps"
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers "Dani California"
• Coheed & Cambria "Welcome Home"
• Fallout Boy "Dead on Arrival"
• The Killers "When You Were Young "
• New Pornographers "Electric Version"
• Bang Camaro "Pleasure (Pleasure)"

Update: I had a link to the Amazon Listmania list, but that list just doesn't work. Must be a bug with Amazon Digital orders and Listmania pages or something on that line. Very, very annoying.

Review: Assassin's Creed

Finished Assassin's Creed today, and I am impressed. This is the first of the games that I have played from Ubisoft Montreal. I skipped the Prince of Persia's (at least the semi-recent ones), so I think this is my first introduction to the Havoc engine and other miscellaneous bouncing off the walls that the character is able to do. In Assassin's Creed, you play two roles. First off you play as Miles, the descendant of a famed Assassin clan from during the Crusades. You have limited interaction while playing as Miles and must glide around the room frequently to see if you can interact with anything. It would be nice here if it would highlight so you could see you could interact from a distance. The second character you play as is Altaïr, Miles' ancestor. Basically the game story centers around the fact that Miles is captured and must relive his ancestor's life through some sort of DNA memory. While this is a little hokie, but if you can suspend your beliefs past that part, you are in for a treat. The story is filled with conspiracy theories, alien technology, and ancient battles, not to mention getting to play as an assassin in a critical time in human history.

The graphics and sounds are executed well and give you a very immersive environment. You get the sounds of battles, plus the sounds of merchants hawking their wares. You get to see swirling dust and flying insects along with copious amounts of blood. The cities are beautifully rendered with tons of space to explore and tons of stupid flags to find.

The gameplay suffers from a few things. Many popular reviewers found this game to be repetitive and I can see where they are coming from. Your bare minimum mission consists of:

1. Arrive at city
2. Visit bureau
3. Do 2 of 6 investigations
4. Visit bureau
5. Kill target
6. Visit bureau

But that is the bare minimum. If you want there are high places to explore, and citizens to save. There are also 6 total investigations to do which all lend to the story and enrich it. Plus if you really would like to get into the role it is helpful to do all the investigations so you can see marked guard placements and good routes to the site. For me the most monotonous part was flag hunting. I got it into my head that I should find all the flags, but after trying to do so in Damascus for 3+ hours, I decided I would just collect the ones I could find (as they are save points) and that would be all.

Another clunky combat / gameplay point is that sometimes it can be a tad grabby. If you are running away from the guards sometimes your character will do very non-elite assassin sort of things like just grab onto a wall or accidentally fall into the water. These end up being very bad things.

But bad things aside, they really didn't detract much from the game and I still had a fun time playing it. In fact I recommend it just to watch the story.

Back to healthy

Well everyone is mostly healthy now. Miranda completely healthy and her parents, well, they are recovering. She is eating again and the vocabulary is increasing, we just don't always understand. But that is alright. Now I just need to take more pictures so my parents stay happy :)

Lions part ways with Shaun Rogers

Reports: Lions decide to part ways with Rogers

It's really hard to say letting go of a pro bowl player is a good thing. But there was also the frustration of seeing nothing produced out of him for 7 of the 16 games this season. See you Shaun, may your next team work out better for you, and may your replacement show up 16 games.

Sick kid

Miranda has her first real cold with fever. We have been lucky before this with 1 other light cold, but this one looks to be a big one. So yesterday I spent an hour and a half in Walgreen's waiting for the prescription that was supposed to be faxed in earlier. Either way, that sucked at I would have got home at 5:30, but instead got home around 7pm.

Add that in with Miranda not sleeping well and we aren't sleeping well and you have a barely functioning household.

But the prognosis is ear infection with a secondary infection that seems to be the flu. Antibiotics for the ear infection and lots of fighting to get her to take the meds, take the tylenol, and just eat or get fluids.

Bad parent addendum

Well, puking didn't end the day. I ended up getting pooped on to. Sigh.


But it looks like Miranda has the flu. Hopefully get her into the doc today and make sure we can do all we can do for her.

Yup. Awful parent award winner for this year too

Sigh.


Who the hell says timeout works? I would really like to know so that I could throw up on them. So my daughter is 20 months. We have been working with her to help understand things and also some of the things that are acceptable and not. So this morning she dumped food all over the floor. Fine. So I ask her to pick up the food and put it back in the bowl. She refuses. So I put her in her chair for a while.

Next I go to clean up the mess and she comes over. She helps a bit. Then when it is back full, she grabs and dumps it. So back in time out, but this time in her room all alone, for 20 seconds. I come in. I try to calm her down so we can talk. She throws up on me. Every time I do timeout with her, I get thrown up on. So how the hell do you do corrective actions when you are doing all you can to get fucking calories and nutrients to her and then have her regurgitate it?

Video Game Review: Open Season

I recently picked up Xbox 360 Holiday Bundle from Amazon for the low price of $20 (although it has gone up) for the reason that it was a great deal. I wasn't sure if the games would be good or not, but I figured that Miranda would appreciate the bright colors and hopefully easy game play of these games. So I finally decided to try Open Season first and what I found surprised me.

I am used to most movie tie-in games and whatnot to be atrocious, but what I found here was something simplistic but at the same point very entertaining. Now this game is used by many "hardcore" gamers to gain achievements or "nerd-cred", but I went in with that as secondary. The basic plot follows that of the movie where you play as both the bear (Boog) and the deer sidekick (can't remember) and Boog transformation from pet to wild animal. The majority of the missions are played as Boog and basically put you "on rails" running through the forest scaring off hunters and loggers. There are a couple of missions that are out of control "river runs" where you attempt to not run into too many things in your path. The controls are good. The camera is not annoying. And in the end, I found that I had fun.

About the only thing that bothered me was what felt like uninspired voice acting. I would hope that they wanted to do this in addition to just picking up a paycheck. But the general storytelling was well laid out and the writing was good and lead to a few chuckles.

In addition to the game, which is 3-5 hours to beat and very, very easy, you also get a number of multiplayer mini-games, as well as slideshows from the movie and various nature trivia facts.

Book Review: Forever War

In The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, you are given the story of a soldier fighting a far off enemy for reasons he does not understand. But in fighting that enemy, he is rapidly alienated from his own species by the progress of time and his lack of aging due to relativity. There are many direct associations that can be made between this and the Vietnam War (for reasons of the Author's involvement) and many have made comparisons between this and Starship Troopers by R.A.H. where the focus of the comparison has been on Starship being more optimistic while in Forever War there is a general sense of dread and then just resolve.

This book was excellent. This is the first time, in my relatively short time of reading Science Fiction, that a book gave me very real sense of dread about the future. On the main characters first trip back to Earth, he is faced with a very different world that has been changed in the 30 years he was gone by food shortages and rising class violence and lawlessness because of how food is handled. Just reading the causes and effects that Haldeman lays out still gives me chills at how very plausible it is.

Of course this trip back to Earth really sets forth the desire for the main character to re-enlist just to leave behind an Earth he does not know. And for then on out, you are given glimpses into the way that the worlds change as our hero finds himself out on longer and longer missions, where he just loses touch with what humanity has become.

Overall, this is definitely a book I can recommend. Don't be put off by the timeline as it is still an amazing story and setup. Also I recommend to make sure you get the latest author definitive edition as that covers alot more of the negative future aspects.

Miranda playing "Where is..."

Taken on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas

I know many of you are eagerly awaiting Boxing Day, but some of us are content with a nice relaxing Christmas day. Presents are nearly open. Family has been mostly called. Internet occasionally has been working.

So far Michelle has talked to all her family. I will likely talk to my family tonight once they get back from other family stuff. Miranda has been opening presents like crazy and loving it. Although it is funny when she finds a toy she likes, you can ask her to open more presents, but all you get is vigorous head shaking and a quiet little no.

It might be disconcerting for some but we have been avoiding the whole Santa thing. I think we are better off just telling Miranda what the holiday means and to say that the presents from from those that we love and love us. I think that is better than Santa.

But here is to the start of an excellent day and fun times spent with my small little family. May all of you have a great and wonderful Christmas.

I am not dead

I swear I will make a real post sometime this weekend. If you want to blame anything, blame the video games. When Miranda is awake it is time to play, but when she goes to bed... I tend to game.

Speaking of which, if you have a 360 and don't have Crackdown, you should pick it up cause it is only $20 at Amazon. (See previous posts...)

$20! Seriously, get it.

Review: Call of Duty 4

So recently I purchased Call of Duty 4 based upon the reviews of Tycho and my friend MatchesMMalone. Let me say that the Multiplayer mode had me hooked right away. The role playing game aspects of experience leading to new abilities and new weapons is really addicting as the leveling up is not tedious in the early levels and really addicting as you bring new weapons into play. Basically as you progress through the multiplayer game you have experience affecting your rank and personal abilities, along with unlocking new sets of challenges. Challenges are ways of increasing rank more quickly as you get experience bonuses for accomplishing a challenge. One challenge would be to kill 5 enemies while in the crouched position or perhaps to call in 5 UAVs. Then there are also specific challenges associated with each weapon in the game. By completing these challenges, you not only get experience but you can acquire new camouflage for the guns or new scopes and capabilities.

So multiplayer aside, there is a great single player campaign here as well, but it is missing a multiplayer coop mode that would have made this absolutely stellar. The single player campaign puts you in the shoes of 3 separate soldiers with specific objectives to meet. The missions are well scripted (much to the same degree that the missions in Halo 3 or other Call of Duty games are well scripted), the story is well told and missions range from easy to fun to challenging without getting to terribly annoying. I ran through the game on Hardened difficulty and really got stuck in only a couple of places where I spent ungodly amounts of reloads attempting to accomplish the mission. But the ending is satisfying and spectacular and very anti-climatic.

So based on this, the multiplayer aspects alone would warrant getting this game, but add in a fun, exciting (~6 hours) single player mode and I think we have a winner.

Where have I been?

Well, it seems that I took a long break from posting. I don't count the flash post as I was just playing with one of the Amazon associate widgets. They are written in flash and I was curious about how they looked on a web page. Now I know.

As hit the national news, large chunks of the Pacific Northwest ended up underwater. Luckily, we avoided that, although we did get a large amount of rain, there are advantages to living near the top of a hill although one could worry about mudslides. Nope, we made out ok.

Mostly I have had a few house guests. John "MatchesMMalone" Knight spent a few days with us as he was out for work. He got a tour of a couple of facilities at Microsoft as well as doing some speaking at the University of Portland. But wait he wasn't all. My parents came out for a week as well to spend time with their granddaughter.

Overall it was fun. We had a cookout while John was here so that we could get together some ex-Whirlpool folks for reminiscing. But I also got my butt kicked playing Risk. Never fight a land war in Asia.



Past that my parents, wife and daughter spent time traveling the area while I took off a couple of days to hang out with them as well. One of the days we made it down to the newly renovated Seattle Aquarium. They have really done a great job with it and Miranda had a blast. Also caught some lunch at Ivar's Acres of Clams which was excellent.

Otherwise it was just a week of visit with friends and family (not to mention all the cleaning leading up to it) and just had a relaxing time.

Things my daughter loves playing with