Deep Fry Everything
Last night we got together at Jim and Andria's and had a "deep fry everything" party. It was at least twice as amazing as it sounds. Katie made a batter and we just kind of ran with it. We deep-fried avocados, which were pretty amazing. We stuffed some jalapenos with Daiya, but I didn't get to a hold of one of those. We also deep-fried some of the standards, round tater things, onion rings, tofu (which fried better without the batter), and sweet potato fries. We had grand plans to make things before deep-frying them, like taquitos, but we just kind of went nuts with the deep fry everything instead.
Then we played a whole pile of Rock Band 3. After moving all of our songs onto one hard drive, it turned out that Katie and I had a total of 358 songs. That's with all of our Rock Band 1, 2, and 3 songs, but that's an unholy amount of songs. The plus side is that there was a little bit of something for pretty much everyone. The down side is "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".
Capital City Biathlon
Yesterday I finished my first biathlon! It was a 3.1 mile run followed by a 15 mile bike ride. Leading up to it, I was mostly concerned with the run because I haven't done much running in the last six months. I spent the last three weeks running three times a week to build up my endurance again. Katie and I did a casual bike ride last week and that was about all the bike training I did. I placed 86th out of 153. I finished the run in 26:36, spent about a minute in the transition area, and finished the bike ride at 53:55. Here are some pictures!
That's me crossing the finish line. It was chip timed, hence all the mats. I rode my mountain bike with commuter tires because a friend of mine was also in it and she only has a mountain bike and I didn't want her to feel left out. I beat a lot of people on much more expensive bikes than mine, and I'm pretty sure I was the second person on a mountain bike to finish. The first was a 15 year old boy. I'm okay with that.
Here's how I'm supposed to feel after I finished! You can't tell but I'm giving a thumbs-up behind that water bottle.
Here's how I actually felt. Sweaty, tired, hungry!
And here's Erika shoving a banana in my face.
The Google Laptop
I signed up to test Google's Chrome OS as soon as I got a notification that it was open on my Chrome start page. I wasn't expecting much to come out of it. I mean, why would Google send me a laptop? But I came back from an early class this morning to find a UPS truck blocking my driveway and then when I got inside I saw that he had dropped off a package for me! I was truly shocked to find it was a laptop! And even though it's a test product, it didn't come with a pile of paperwork and instructions. It came with one two-sided sheet. One side is for getting connected to the internet, the other side is some suggestions of things to try and simple usage instructions. But enough words, here are a bunch of poorly lit, blurry photos!
The Cr-48 in all it's glory! Note the huge touchpad.
A super-blurry photo of the search button, and you can see some of the browser buttons at the top!
The log-on screen! That's an awful picture I took while I was getting changed this morning. The laptop has a built-in webcam and microphone!
This is the start page. Unless you already had some pages open when you last shut it down, this is what it goes to after login! There is literally nowhere else to go, everything is contained within the browser.
The only things in the system tray are a clock, your connection status icon, and a battery power indicator.
The settings page is only slightly different from the settings page on the standalone browser but it's really just to accommodate a few essential system settings.
This thing comes with 100MB/month of Verizon 3G data for 2 years. FOR FREE.
Look familiar? Nothing really different here.
Pretty much the same as the browser, except the account stuff.
The same scary stuff that the browser has. I've left it all turned on because I am actually interested in testing this thing and if my browsing habits help, then Google can have them.
Some simple account management and login security.
Some of the pictures that didn't come out were the actual laptop itself. It's flat black, with no markings. No serial numbers, no giant Google logo, no nothing! There's a couple of vents on the sides for heat, a VGA port, 1 USB port, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a power receptacle, and that's it. No disc drives and this thing is absolutely silent when it's on. The battery is enormous but it's also completely flat. I don't know the dimensions of it but I'd hazard a guess that it's a 12 inch screen and no more than an inch and a half thick.
I plan on taking it to school tomorrow to see how well it plays with the campus wireless VPN. Overall, really excited to have a new toy to play with!
Metro 2033
This game caught me by surprise. It didn't get much hype and what it did get didn't excite me. Crawling around in tunnels in the dark, who cares? Then I found out that the developers are the engineers who made S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I loved. It got pretty positive reviews, with some complaints being about the difficulty and poor gunplay and dumb AI.
I'm pleased to report these complaints are mostly unfounded. Metro 2033 is a beautiful game with a strong narrative, even if Artyom's motivations are somewhat unclear. I beat the game on normal difficulty without much trouble. The weapons in the game are no less responsive than those in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I knew from the start that bullets were currency in the game, and that crappy bullets existed, but I didn't figure out how to use those crappy bullets until halfway through the game. The crappy bullets really are crappy, being much louder, less powerful, and more inaccurate. It really makes you value those money bullets and forced me to decide when it was worth shooting my money away.
Around the halfway mark, there's a vendor who will sell you either heavier armor or stealthier clothing. I had spent nearly all of my good bullets on a better gun, which was poor foresight on my behalf because guns are everywhere. I was duly punished for it though, as I was never offered the opportunity to buy a different armor again.
I got Metro 2033 on sale, and it's one of those games in which I wish I had bought it on release. The game is short, but it's really immersive. I hope 4A made enough to keep developing, because I'll definitely get their next title the minute it comes out.
Answering the Call
This isn't a review. I'm not done yet. I just started, really.
I blasted through Bioshock 2, and now I can turn my attention to STALKER: Call of Pripyat. Pripyat is the third STALKER game, and after the disappointing second outing Clear Sky, it feels like the sequel that Shadow of Chernobyl deserves. If you own Shadow of Chernobyl or Clear Sky through Steam, you can get Call of Pripyat now for $20. It sells for only $30 to begin with, but selling it for $20 through a customer loyalty program is criminal.
Once a day, at a random time, a radiation emission blasts The Zone, killing anyone not within cover and scattering new artifacts across the landscape. I had just finished a mission when the emission warning sounded. My nearest cover was a good distance away and I was overburdened with loot. The warning gives you two minutes, I make it close within a minute.
My cover is in a hillside bunker. As soon I step inside, I spot three zombies. I put a few bullets in them and they drop. No one else is coming near my bunker so I don't bother looting their bodies. In the next room is two more. I take a few bullets for trespassing, by one that was hiding in the bathroom, and keep trying to make my way deeper into the bunker. I'm technically not safe until I'm dug in like a tick. I can hear barking inside, which could be a number of any variety of nasty mutants.
I turn my flashlight on and creep further in. I'm safe now, but I see that the barking is from a pack of mutated rats. I spray some bullets and the majority of them expire. The Zone is scorched with radiation while I sit in the dark with mutant rats running back and forth past me. The wave of destruction passes, I work my way back to the bodies of the zombies to collect ammo, bandages, food, and useful equipment before I emerge from the bunker and start on my path back to the STALKER base.
This was about five minutes of gameplay. Since Sunday I've spent almost six hours playing.
Thursday!
Thursdays are fantastic. On Fridays I only have two classes and they're flight classes that require little prep and homework, so my weekend almost begins on Thursday. Since my classes on Monday are the same low-prep flight classes from Friday, I really almost have four whole days to get Tuesday's homework done. It's fantastic!
My Last Week in the Army
This has been a long time coming, eh? Six years in the making. It's not my last working week either, that was months ago. This is my last actual week. Rather uneventful too. Just getting some paperwork stamped and signed, and standing around to get an award for spending six years fixing computers.
In four days, my Army obligations will, for the most part, be officially over. I have plenty to be spiteful of but I can't for the life of me dig up those graves. I just so happy that this is all finally over and I can go back to a normal life and move on to being more than just the dude who fixes your printer.
Here's the short list of people I want to publicly thank; Martinez, Parlier, Thomson, Reina, Wilson, Key, Hice, Laforest, Blythe, Lawson, Saro, Burditus, Killman, Sweet, Jackson, Jones, Welsh, Baker, and O'Rourke.
I stop shaving on Wednesday and I stop wearing the uniform on Thursday. Beyond that I'm just working on being a real person again.
Getting Out
I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that I have my early Army release date set. As of January 22nd, I'll be officially out of the Army. That's 90 days early and I start my terminal leave (using up some vacation days) on January 8th. I could've started terminal leave a lot earlier but I've been telling everyone in my unit January 8th and if I spent all my leave time, I wouldn't have any to sell. Selling leave isn't a great trade but I'd rather have a big bundle of cash right before I start school than two months of not working and still getting paid.
So if I wasn't doing much work before I'm definitely not doing much now! I start the out-processing rigmarole on December 15th, which will either be super easy because not a lot of guys are getting out the same time I am or absolutely impossible because everyone will be on Christmas vacation.
In case you don't know me at all, I am super excited about getting out of the Army and finally moving on with my life. Ever since the beginning of my last deployment (November 2007) I've felt like I've been stuck in an enormous rut; unable to progress in my career with nowhere to go and no help to look to. I've been doing the same goddamned job for my entire enlistment in the same unit on the same post. I've gone nowhere and seen nothing but 1-32 CAV and Iraq. It is well past-time that I start something new.
Of course I've been told for years that there's plenty of other jobs and places in the Army but I never saw any of them and even if I were to stay in I wouldn't have seen any change until at least 2011. I showed a few people I knew a few things early on and they held on to me as long as they could and then handed me off to the next guys who did the same thing, my own career be damned. I think it's safe to say that, like all soldiers, I've been used up and abused and now I'm ready to be cast aside.
So what the hell am I doing anyway? I'm going to school! Southern Illinois University Carbondale! I'll be studying aviation flight for two years before moving on to finish out the two years for a bachelor of science degree in aviation management, and since I have so many existing credits anyway, I may take a minor in computer science. In four years I'll be flying planes for a living. I really couldn't be more excited!
