After a little more than a year of writing blogs on blogger, I've decided that it's time for a change. It's been fun, but I'm moving on to bigger and better things. While blogger did what I needed at the time, I eventually grew tired of it and my layout all together. After weeks of searching for a new residence for my blog, I found the perfect fit at tumblr. I love tumblr because it's simple, minimalistic, and modular. You can find my new blog at www.boohonda.com. Clever, I know. This blog will remain active for a while, but this will be my last blog post here. Please follow me at my new website. I will keep you interested, I promise.

Get a load of these Headset Hotties. LOL.

Wish this happened in my city. I'm ready to spring my zombie plan into action!

If you've never seen Sockbaby, you need to go here right now. Sockbaby is a no-budget series of short films created by Douglas TenNapel, creator of Earthworm Jim. The first 3 shorts were released in 2004, and I was instantly hooked. The one-liners, fight scenes, and characters all make for a good time. Episode 4 was just released earlier this month, and it definitely ups the ante. Shot in some-what HD, and starring a few big-name actors (Doug Jones of Hellboy and Dan & Jon Heder), the latest installation is probably the best yet. With the cliffhanger at the end of episode 4, Sockbaby 5 looks to be in the not-too-distant future.

Kathy recently finished reading the Twilight series of books, which in case you didn't know has to do with vampires. Throughout her reading, she game me summaries of what was happening, and I was disappointed with a lot of the characteristics that the book gave vampires. For example, in the book vampires simply "dazzled" in the sunlight. Frustrated, I told Kathy that we had to watch Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which was sitting around in our DVD collection. She had seen parts of it a while back, but she didn't remember much.

I absolutely love this movie. The animation is simply stunning, the story is moving, and the English voice work is surprisingly good. Kathy was able to see that according to Vampire Hunter D, vampires don't dazzle, but instead catch fire in the sunlight, which I find to be more accurate with vampire mythology. After watching this, I told her that there was an older Vampire Hunter D movie which neither of us had seen, and she said she wouldn't mind watching it. I knew the film was old, but I had forgotten how different anime looked in it's early years. The art style is definitely dated, but there is a certain appreciation for old cartoons/anime. Kathy didn't enjoy this one as much as she did Bloodlust, but I liked it. The voice work wasn't as solid, but the story was decent, and it was nice to see D actually deal with more life-threatening situations. In the original movie, D seems much more human, while in Bloodlust he is a lot more cold, with a lot less dialogue and emotion. I suppose that would come after years of being estranged from humans and civilization in general, and being a half-vampire, half-human doesn't help much either. In the end, it's a great series of movies, and I'm kinda tempted to buy some of the original novels when I come across a little more spending money.

I don't know about you, but I for one got sick of the default blue taskbar/theme from Windows XP a while ago. When I upgraded to a desktop recently, I wanted the feel of the computer to be different as well. Above is a screen cap of my current set-up. I went with a visual style that was simple and minimalistic. I am a screen-real-estate whore, so the less cluttered and the more room I have the better. Of course having a bigger monitor/resolution helps, but you have to make due with what you have. Although I'm currently still using a very windows theme, I've seen a few themes that look amazing. They use a shell replacement called litestep. While I don't know all the details at the moment, at some point in the future I plan on eventually trying out a litestep setup on my PC. It may look something like this:

Anyways, Lifehacker has a short and sweet tutorial on how to make simple changes to your existing XP theme: Check it out here. Some of my favourite themes can be found here.

Games to complete:
Portal
Blue Dragon
Left 4 Dead

Games to start:
Bioshock
The Darkness
Killer 7
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy VI
Half Life 2
Half Life 2: Episode 1

Games to re-play:
Final Fantasy IV
Chrono Trigger
Half Life

After almost 4 years of doing my computing on a laptop, I've finally upgraded to an awesome desktop PC. It is night and day compared to my old system. My graphic-intensive programs don't lag like they used to, and my Valve games run like butter. Here are the specs:

XFX Nforce 680i Sli Mobo
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 Ghz
EVGA 9500 GT 1GB DDR2 RAM
4GB DDR2 SDRAM
MediaPC All-In-One Card Reader
Logitech $8 Keyboard!
Samsung 22x DVD Burner
500GB 7200RPM HDD
OCZ 600W PSU
Samsung 19" Widescreen Monitor
Total Cost: $531 (after shipping and rebates)

All of my components were purchased at newegg.com. I was fortunate enough to get the CPU and mobo from my wife's uncle for free. He actually works for Intel, and every once in a while he gets free stuff. They just gave him an Intel Quad Core Extreme for free, so he had these two parts laying around, which are probably the most expensive parts of my system. This was my first time builing a PC. It was pretty easy for the most part; straight forward plugging in pieces here and there. The only problem I ran into was that I incorrectly mounted my heatsink the first time, cause my CPU to overheat and my PC to shut down after being on for about 40 seconds. In those 40 seconds I was able to check the BIOS, and I found out that the CPU was reaching temperatures of 220F. I know. Luckily my mobo didn't catch on fire. After mounting the heatsink properly, everything else was a breeze. I finished downloading/installing my most important programs yesterday, so all that is left to do it wipe my old laptop and sell it. 2009 is turning out pretty good so far.

So it just hit me that there are no female characters in TF2. It would be interesting if they eventually made a patch so that you could select between male and female characters for each class. I can see why they didn't do it though. It would have easily been double the work for the majority of the game.

Well 2008 has come and gone. It's insane how fast it flew by. In that single year I ended my affair with apartment life, bought a house, got a new dog, lost my old dog, began enjoying different kinds of alcohol, started playing PC FPS again (thanks Sam), hosted my first Thanksgiving and Xmas, and really strengthened a lot of my waning friendships. 2008 was filled with the good and the bad, and I know that 2009 is going to be a whole lot better. Just keep your eyes open for a mini Bujanda. ;)