Jeremy's Blog

… especially for lazy people.

Thanks to Dutch giving me a wireless keyboard and mouse that he wasn’t using, I decided to start using the HDMI out to hook it up to my TV. It worked out pretty well:

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying this setup, so far. It’s even really nice for writing code. I think the most awesome part about the whole thing is that it can do full 1080p. My previous HDMI-enabled machine could only do 720p. Since the video card is pretty beefy (for a laptop), I’ve been playing a few games in this setup. It’s nice. Just as good, if not better, than sitting in the recliner and playing on a normal console.

Now, I need to get a gamepad that’ll work with it wirelessly …

I’m currently holding a contest on Twitter to give away a free copy of Left 4 Dead. If you’re interested in winning a copy, check out the rules. If you like this contest and would like to see more like it, give it a Digg. If the return ends up being pretty great, I’ll probably do a few more like it.

Dutch and I have been playing quite a lot of Soul Calibur, lately. I’ve got a custom character named Atrophius who I created back in November of last year when I rented the game for the first time. Atrophius is a big ninja with Siegfried’s combat style. He’s a pretty awesome character and I can throw down pretty well with him. Atrophius and Nishi, the character Dutch created and is affectionately referred to as “Naughty Nurse Angel Cat”, have been very key characters in our ascent and descent through the game’s “Tower of Souls”.

For those unfamiliar with the game, one of the game modes is the “Tower of Souls” which features a 60 floor tower that you can ascend or descend. Ascending takes it 1 – 4 floors at a time with pauses in between to select different characters for the next set of floors and gives you information on the treasures available and whatnot. Descending is a non-stop run from the top to the bottom and you only get to select two characters for the entire run. So far, we’ve made it to the last two sets of floors for the ascent and have  gone 25 consecutive floors in the descent.

The tower is technically supposed to be a single-player game mode, but in the areas where we’re allowed to select multiple characters we’ve been selecting one for me and one for him and when it comes time to switch character’s we’ll quickly pass the controller over to the other person. It’s actually been quite fun and helpful, because we’re both proficient in different styles of play, so when one thing isn’t working we can pass it over to one another and see if they have better luck.

Maybe we’ll get through the last two sets of floors soon. It’s probably a long way off before we can even hope to manage to accomplish the descent. Unless we do it the cheap way and find a character who we can successfully spam the same attacks over and over again or something.

It’s been a long time, I know. At the risk of giving myself nothing to blog about for another month, I’m going to do a quick catch up of everything that’s been going on lately.

At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

I picked up Portal a few days ago, because I’ve been hearing from just about everyone that the game is amazing. I became a fan pretty much instantly. I played through 18 ½ levels just on the first day.

For the uninformed, Portal is basically a puzzle-shooter. The basic premise to the game is that you can place two portals on certain surfaces. You go in one portal and come out the other. You keep your motion and velocity when you come out of the opposite portal, so you have to keep that in mind when solving a bunch of the puzzles.

It’s very much a game you have to think about. I got stuck a couple of times and had to get some help from other people in the room that could take a fresh look at what was going on around me. The ending is pretty cool and there’s a lot of humor throughout the game.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can pick it up for $20 by itself or for $40 with The Orange Box. With the Orange Box, you also get Half-Life 2, HL 2: Episode One, HL 2: Episode Two, HL 2: Lost Coast, Peggle Extreme, and Team Fortress 2. Not a bad buy for all that, but I just bought Portal separately because the others would probably just take up space and I’d never play them.

Give the game a shot. It’s pretty fun and funny at the same time.

I’ve received a few questions from people asking about when the next Oblivion Tale is going to go up. Well, I’m on vacation, so I haven’t been playing Oblivion for a while. Additionally, I don’t actually own the game. I was only renting it before, as it’s still $60, even for as long as it’s been out. Hopefully, I can put another one up soon, but it could be a while.

So, I occasionally do weird or interesting things on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (hereafter referred to strictly as Oblivion) that I believe I can translate directly into story form. What I’m going to start doing is retelling the accounts that I’ve had, strictly in the first person, and extremely dramatized so that there’s enough fluff to make a decent story. The idea is to work on my writing a bit, since I haven’t exercised that muscle in quite some time. Hopefully, those of you who actually read this blog will enjoy the stories. If not, you can just skip over them. They’ll all have the “Oblivion Tales” caption in the title.

So, if you’re interested in the Oblivion Tales, read on. This is my account of a rather random attempt at assassinating the Countess of Anvil …

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