Serenity Trailer

The trailer for the movie Serenity was released today. I was a huge fan of the show it was based on, Firefly. The trailer is pretty good, but not what I was expecting. Maybe it's the fact that it's a standard Hollywood trailer, which doesn't match what I know about the show. Regardless, I'm still excited about the movie, which is released September 30. Buy the DVDs of the show. You won't be disappointed.

Running and raiding

Tonight's run: 2.5 miles, 23 minutes 10 seconds. I was very excited about this. I felt like hell, but it was fast. I'm moving up to 3 miles next run.

On WoW tonight, we raided Upper Blackrock Spire (no surprise, really, it's the raid we always do). But I finally got another Shadowcraft piece, the Shadowcraft Tunic. That gets me 3 pieces which gets me a set bonus of +2 to daggers. Not big, but cool nonetheless.

Wallpaper: good, bad, ugly

Good: It's (mostly) up, and it looks pretty good. We still have a few places to finish, but we ran out of time and energy.

Bad: It's so time consuming. We started at 10 and worked pretty steadily until about 630, and got approximately two walls done. So much work...

Ugly: Me. I'm spent. It's the next morning, I got a decent night of sleep, and I'm still spent. I feel like I'm hungover. I could easily go back to bed. I still might...

I'm supposed to run today. Actually, I was technically supposed to run this weekend, but between the wallpaper and the ass cold temperatures, I skipped it. We'll see what happens.

Edit: I forgot to mention the fricking snow. When I woke up Sunday morning, the grass was almost entirely covered in snow. Ridiculous. Why do people live in the Midwest?

Edit #2: During our lunch break on Sunday, I beat Final Fantasy 1 on the Game Boy Advance. I first beat this game in 1991, on the original NES. It's fun going back sometimes.

OMG Snow

It's April 23. And it's snowing. Not just a little snow either. Enough snow to make the grass white. Ick. It was 70 degrees 3 days ago.

Wallpapering the dining room today. Yikes. I've been dreading doing this for a long time. But despite a rocky start, we actually made good headway with limited mistakes. Usually the wife and I don't get along when we do home improvement projects, but we worked together well on this one. We're not nearly done, but confidence levels are high. We'll see if we can get it done tomorrow.

PVP is great

World of Warcraft is my drug of choice lately. I play it basically to the exclusion of all other video games. I'm in a great guild with a total of 13 level 60's, 60 being the current maximum level. We do a lot of instanced dungeon raids to get uber equipment with a partner guild. But the latest patch of WoW has brought us the Honor System.

In WoW, there are 2 main factions, the Alliance (made up of Humans, Night Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves) and the Horde (made up of Undead, Orcs, Trolls, and Tauren). Players on either side can kill players of the opposing side (with some rules, depending on the kind of server). Previously, you would only do this for fun. The Honor System rewards you for killing players of the opposite faction by tracking your Honorable Kills. At the end of each week, your contribution to the cause is ranked against the other players in your faction, and you are given a rank. That rank entitles you to certain rewards. So now people have incentive to fight against players on the other side.

So Thursday night our guild and the partner guild gathered to take on Thunder Bluff, the Tauren capital. It was a blast. Despite some major crashes, we managed to own the capital for at least an hour. As Horde players trickled in, we leveled them. Finally, we were repulsed, but it took a crash and a large zerg of Horde players to get us out. I'll post pictures when I get a chance.

The beginning

Who am I?

I'm a 26 year old guy who lives in South Bend, Indiana. I graduated from Michigan State University in May of 2000 with a degree in Computer Science. I work as a systems consultant for one of the top 10 consulting companies.

I'm a husband. I met my wife 10 years ago, at engineering camp of all places. We were friends for a while, lost touch, met up again a few years later, dated, and married in August of 2001. We have a house in South Bend and two cats.

I'm a video gamer. Most of my evenings involve killing large numbers of digitally rendered creatures or people. I'll be the first to admit that I'm addicted. I blame my dad. He was/still is a geek too, he had to get all of the latest toys. The first thing that I remember is using his Atari computer at age 4 or 5. It had some of the standards, like Donkey Kong and Qbert. I'd sneak down to the basement early in the mornings to fire it up and play. It was all down hill from there. My brother and I pooled out meager resources bought a Nintendo within a year or so of it coming out. I currently own a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo 64, a Playstation 2, an XBox, a classic GameBoy (actually my mother's), a GameBoy Color, and a GameBoy Advance SP.

So speaking of my family. My parents live in Shanghai, China. My dad works for one of the largest US manufacturing companies, and has moved a lot. I have a younger sister who is a High School math and science teacher, as well as the head competitive cheerleading coach. I have a younger brother who is a credit analyst at a bank.

That's about the summary of me. From here on out, it'll be standard blogging. I'll probably talk about World of Warcraft, the only game I play right now. I'll talk about the softball team I'm on. I'll talk about training for the 5k race coming up in June. It could be fun. It could suck. We'll have to see. :-)