Super Bowl Ads

Yeah, I know, this is really late. But anyway--while overall I didn't think this year's Super Bowl had a ton of great standout ads, I'd just like to say that I loved all three Coke ones. "Vending" in particular is fascinating if you watch carefully... actually, there are a few kinda creepy aspects of it if you pay attention. Watch and see if you know what I mean. ;)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566275/

Star Wars Anniversary Year: Ep. IV SE

As I'm ashamed to note I never mentioned before, this is a very special year for Star Wars fans: it's the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Episode IV. And now, today, we celebrate the first milestone: the 10th anniversary of the Special Edition of Episode IV.

Sure it was controversial, but it sure did clean up the film a lot. :)

See here.

Happy Anniversary, Ep. IV SE!!!

Congrats to Microsoft on Vista and Office 07

I'd like to congratulate Microsoft on (finally) launching both Windows Vista and Office 2007 today. Vista is certainly a huge upgade from XP, and while it doesn't surpass what's out there in a lot of ways, it's an important springboard looking to the future. I'm excited for Service Pack 1 already. :-D

As for Office 2007, I think it's actually pretty revolutionary. The whole ribbon, the ease-of-use -- I think it's a huge leap forward. Next up they need to get super-easy (as in, Google Docs-easy) collaboration in it and maybe an "Office Lite" online version to keep pace with Google on that front. But really, I've tried Google Docs, and while it's passable if the computer doesn't have Word, it just can't compare. I *need* the Word feature set... and keyboard shortcuts. Those are critical. :)

Meanwhile, MSN is *NOT* dead and Windows Live is *NOT* replacing it, no matter what some people may say. Read this: http://liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/01/28/msn-revival-the-january-effect.aspx.

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Speaking of long-delayed products, my web site v.5 should be online in the next couple of weeks. But I'm in the midst of a huge History paper, so don't hold your breath. But look on the bright side -- it's been in development for merely 1/5th the time as Vista!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Sorry I've been silent recently. I don't really have any excuse.

But here's some fun reading:

Patrick Curry's 52 Game Ideas (one from each week of 2006)
http://www.patrickcurry.com/thoughts/?page_id=67

And this looks really neat:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/06/nikkos-r2-d2-skype-callin-and-media-playin-oddities/

Merry Christmas Eve!

Merry Christmas Eve!

(And Happy Holidays in general!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I've been working on my web site and hope to have it (FINALLY) online by the end of this week.

Casino Royale

I saw Casino Royale on Friday night and loved it. :D

Happy (Belated) Halloween!

Exactly 24 hours ago (unless I'm quite mistaken) I was trick-or-treating. Yay candy!

Happy belated Halloween!

The Long Tail

Oh, and I forgot to mention this in that post:

Today I started reading The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, WIRED editor. (That despite the fact that I still haven't finished Star Wars: Dark Lord...) And it's really good. Very interesting. Neat graphs.

In essence, with e-retailers like iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, and eBay, if you put the product out there it will find a market, no matter how small, no matter how niche. And with little or no distribution costs and no shelf space to waste, in the past decade or so it's actually started to make economic sense. Rhapsody still regularly sells copies of it's 100,000th most popular song, and so on. The long tail gets very close to zero the farther out from the "hits" you go, but it never quite reaches zero, and you have so much quantity way out there in the tail that combined it can still make up a huge part of, say, Amazon's total revenues.

Very very interesting. And it applies to just about anything these days - Google, Netflix, you name it...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

U.S. Population Reaches 300 Million!

As of mere seconds ago, the United States population has officially hit 300 million!!!

CONGRATULATIONS USA!

(For an analysis of the milestone, and a mildly depressing note that we may have [i]actually[/i] crossed 300 million months ago, see MSNBC.)

LOST (and autographed Path of Destruction)

Last night I finished the first season of Lost... kind of. I think I skipped more episodes than I saw. (That's what you get for watching with friends who've pretty much seen it all. :) ) Oh well, I still get the gist of it. And it's still really good.

"He just..... exploded."
"...yeah...."

Oh, and yesterday I walked into Barnes & Noble on the way home from school and happened to find an autographed Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction sitting there right on the shelf. It was my lucky day... :)

Xbox News, Willy's Birthday and 4-Hour Deliveries

X06, Microsoft's annual Euro Xbox show, took place Wednesday and Thursday. There was a lot of big news, mainly:

1. "Halo Wars," a real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe and developed by the guys who made Age of Empires. Trailer here.
2. Peter Jackson teaming up with Microsoft Game Studios to create two new games, including one Halo-based one.
3. Project Gotham Racing 4 was announced.
4. Another Banjo Kazooie game from Rare was announced.
5. Bioshock, the next Splinter Cell game (after Double Agent), and two downloadable Grand Theft Auto IV "episodes" (to be released shortly after the main game) are now Xbox exclusives.
6. Assassin's Creed, an incredible-looking ex-PS3-exclusive game, was demoed live for the first time. The producer mentioned that the Xbox 360 version will actually have slightly better AI than the PS3 one thanks to better threading technology (whatever that means).
7. The original Doom is now available on Xbox Live Arcade.

Pretty exciting. :) The great thing about the Xbox Live Marketplace (the place for all Xbox Live downloads) is that Wednesday afternoon I had already downloaded trailers and demos of games just being shown at X06.

Speaking of rapid distribution...

I just learned of "LicketyShip Same Day Delivery." It'll get whatever gadget you order to your door within four hours. That's crazy. And incredible.

Willy's Bday

Willy's birthday was yesterday. One gift is now sitting on top of our Xbox: the Xbox Live Vision camera. It enables video chat during games (and outside them), picture messaging, custom display pictures, and gesture-based gaming a la the EyeToy. It also lets you overlay the current video on your Dashboard background with a few nifty effects, including a verrrry nice water effect that makes the image ripple when you move. (Not the text, mind you, only the background... rippling text with just get annoying...)

'Enemy of the State'; Bin Laden trail goes 'stone cold'

Last night we watched Enemy of the State on AMC. Quite a good movie, and incredibly relevant today, especially considering it was made in 1998 - the plot sounds like something that would be thought up today, not eight years ago. The amount of surveillance today is amazing, and not just on the part of the government. Thanks to Google, MySpace, and other wonders of the modern web, ordinary people have more ability than ever to spy on their fellow citizens.

Get a name, do a lookup on Google. Do a little phone book searching, or reverse phone book search if you start with a number. Find an address, get satellite and aerial imagery. And all of that can happen within a minute. Do a search on MySpace or Facebook and find even more. If their information is "private," ask to be their friend. Chances are they'll accept. If not, friend their friends to give yourself a little more credibility, so that it doesn't seem like you're coming totally out of the blue. It's creepy.

Of course, the government has far more capabilities, as explored by Enemy of the State. This morning I read an article on MSNBC about the ongoing hunt for Osama bin Laden:

WP: Bin Laden trail goes ‘stone cold’ - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

Very interesting stuff. Sounds like it would make for an excellent movie a few years down the road...

Back to School

Yesterday was my first day back at school. School means homework. Homework means sad Toph. :( Oh well, it wasn't all that bad...

In other news, Tophtucker.com 5.0 should be online by the end of the weekend. Wohoo!

Now I'm off to sleep... tomorrow I leave on a one-night orientation trip... off I go...

The Red Sox, Little Miss Sunshine, and Blake Ross

The Red Sox are kind of falling apart. They won tonight, but in the press conference Terry Francona was about as depressing (and depressed) as I've ever seen anyone on TV be. As the NESN commentators put it, you wouldn't guess from the sound of it that the Sox had won. After each question there was a long silence before someone finally worked up the nerve to ask another question.

I can't remember a time when so many of the Sox's star players were injured. Manny, Nixon, Varitek, Schilling, Papelbon, Mirabelli for a while... Ortiz has heart issues, and Jon Lester has cancer, for crying out lound.

Little Miss Sunshine

On a happier note, we went to Little Miss Sunshine tonight and it was excellent. Steve Carell was excellent, as usual, as was the rest of the cast.

Blake Ross

Best known as one of the lead developers on Firefox. I do not use Firefox, and I don't like the fanatical tack some people take on the issue, particularly folks like those at Explorer Destroyer who advise webmasters to actually block access to their web site if the user is using Internet Explorer. What!? That's ridiculous... I thought Firefox was supposed to be about giving users choice.

Today, though, I read a couple of interviews with Blake Ross, and he seems like a very sensible fellow. He's not afraid to say that IE7 is actually pretty good. He doesn't categorically denounce Microsoft as evil tyrants. His arguments are logical. He's not cocky, he's down-to-earth, he understands that there's a middle ground. "We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing," he said in the Seattle PI interview. As he puts it, he didn't start Firefox to destroy Microsoft. It's more that the whole field had become too stagnant; that you can't let Microsoft rest on its laurels, because that just results in the proliferation of spyware and adware and all that nasty stuff.

I wish that some of the more zealous Firefox advocates would be more like that. :-\

Back from Taconnet

We return earlier today from Taconnet after our four-week absence. Our stay was great, as usual... pretty soon I'm going to update my Taconnet site with photos and videos.

In other news, I'm using Windows Live Writer (Beta) to write this. I'm just trying it out, but I might start using it exclusively if it works well, which it seems to.

That's all for now... ta-ta. :)

Off to Taconnet!

We're heading off to Taconnet in a few short minutes, so I'll be even less likely to blog than normal. We're back at the end of August.

I just uploaded a new Taconnet minisite to my web site:
http://www.tophtucker.com/taconnet

I managed to integrate Windows Live Local into it... that was fun. The rest of my web site upgrade is coming at the end of the summer.

Off to Maine now! (I hope to get a ton of reading done...) Goodbye. :)

Zune + Xbox

As someone who loves conspiracy theories and evil genius and all that stuff, this is fascinating:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/20/the-clicker-zune-its-all-about-the-ecosystem/

Regarding Microsoft's failure in the music player market thus far: "Does that mean that Microsoft was wrong? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were just being a tad disingenuous in regard to their true plans. It's quite possible that we're just now seeing Microsoft's first real play in the digital audio player market. Perhaps, just perhaps, Microsoft has been stalling. And while claiming that Microsoft has just been stalling (as opposed to, say, clueless) might give them credit for an inordinate amount of self-awareness, we must closely examine this particular situation."

It's very interesting how J. Allard and the Xbox team have avoided being burdened by operating within a big, relatively slow-moving company like Microsoft by operating outside the normal rules of play. Supposedly that's what they're doing with Zune. Just throwing away Windows Media Player and everything and having total vertical integration, possibly including the Xbox.

It gets better. It was noted in an Engadget/Joystiq interview with Peter Moore on May 12, 2006 that J. Allard has been MIA since the Xbox 360 launch. Moore's excuse was that he had a BMX event or something, and that it was determined that Moore should be the singular face of the Xbox, and the Allard was super-busy running the platform. Turns out he's apparently been working on this project all along.

It, of course, remains to be seen whether Zune will be a total flop. Last time Microsoft launched a hype campaign (anyone remember Origami?) it turned out to be a disappointment, basically just a mini-Tablet PC with some extra interface stuff. But it'll certainly be interesting.

Coming Zune

http://www.comingzune.com/

All I can think of is ol' Didier from the Origen Xbox 360 hype machine. And if rumors are to be believed, the same team is behind Zune as was behind the Xbox 360. Oh how I love the intrigue.

In any case, initial pics of "Zune" are underwhelming. Come on, folks, you need something distinctive.

Also, it's a peculiar strategy in general - a full reversal of their previous one, which was handling the software end and letting partners make the devices and stores.

Also, after the big deal that was made about Urge, am I supposed to believe that this scraps that? And what about old MSN Music?

This is going to get interesting. As WIRED put it, get ready for the grudge match of the decade. Only, they were talking about Microsoft vs. Google. I'm talking more about Microsoft vs. Apple. But it's really more of a battle royale.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Blog!

Today marks this blog's third birthday... or should I call it the third anniversary of its creation? Regardless, it's three years old now. Congrats, blog! :)

Wow, lots of birthdays recently.

July 12 - Ben Burtt
July 13 - Harrison Ford
July 15 - MSNBC turns 10 [see here]
July 16 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince turns 1 [see here]
July 20 - This blog turns 3 [see here]
July 21 - My mom's b-day!
July 22 - Windows Live Messenger turns 7 [see here]

Congrats to them all! :)

Shadows of the Empire & Movie Recap

Shadows of the Empire

I just finished Shadows of the Empire earlier today, one year to the day after I finished Harry Potter 6. Overall, I thought it was very good. For the past, oh, 9 months or so I've been slogging throught the Original Trilogy time period, which means...

1. A New Hope novelization - out before the movie was, an interesting time capsule, but not exactly a page-turner
2. Splinter of the Mind's Eye - first spin-off book, released & taking place before Empire; again, an interesting and very dated time capsule (read: Luke/Leia romance)
3. The Empire Strikes Back novelization - not so interesting anymore, for the most part; by this point I'm slogging through my self-inflicted tour of the OT
4. Shadows of the Empire - see below.
5. Return of the Jedi novelization - I'm only a page into it and already it's gotten into "fourth dimention" mush

I originally started this because I had never read them, I thought it'd be interesting to go through the saga in order, and because there were no new Star Wars books out at the time. (This was after I finished the New Jedi Order and then The Joiner King, but before The Unseen Queen came out.) I thought I'd be able to get through it in no time, maybe by the end of 2005. Boy was I wrong.

Turns out most of these don't go by nearly as quickly as the latest reads. I was at the Battle of Hoth at the New Year; I finished Empire and started Shadows a couple months ago. In other words, it's taken me a pathetically long time.

I'll try to speed through Return of the Jedi. In the time I've been stuck doing this - and once I started it was too late to get out - several more major books have been released. Now, my to-read list (in the order in which I'll read them) consists of:

1. Republic Commando: Hard Contact
2. A short story or two
3. Dark Lord
4. A short story or two
5. The Unseen Queen
6. The Swarm War
7. Outbound Flight [?]
8. Survivor's Quest [?]
9. Legacy of the Force: Betrayal [?]

The last few are questionable because they depend on when/if I get a couple of the newer books.

So: I started this project because I was totally caught up and had too little to read. By the time I finish it I'll be way behind again. I'm hoping to be mostly caught up again by the end of the summer... Maine (where we go at the end of the month) is always a great time for reading. With luck I'll be done with ROTJ by then and I can get on to the fun stuff.

(Of course, you can't forget summer reading books; I have three.)

Anyway, how did I like Shadows of the Empire? In short: a lot. Suprisingly so, in fact. It's a story I'm familiar with; one of my first Star Wars videogames (along with Rogue Squadron, Rebel Assault II, and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter - they seriously need to make a sequel to XvT) was Shadows of the Empire for N64. Boy did I love that jetpack...

Anyway, I thought that SotE (only one letter off from that other OT bridge novel, SotME) did an excellent job of tying together the movies. It brought up some very interesting concepts, one of the most significant of which was Vader's attempts to heal himself. He was shattered, mentally and physically, after Episode III; he had, in many ways, lost touch with the Force. In SotE he draws on the purest dark side to let him breathe unassisted for precious seconds at a time; in Return of the Jedi he manages without his mask for, what, a minute? I'll never view that scene the same way again. Vader managed an unprecedented feat by drawing on, not the dark side, but the light side. Instead of pushing love and joy out of his mind, he embraced it. Yeah, so he couldn't keep it up for long, but he was pretty much fried by then anyway. It was a victory for him.

Reading the saga chronologically does have its benefits. I make some connections like that that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I recommend to any Star Wars fan that they watch Episode I through VI in order; it only takes a day, and it's a neat experience.

Movie Recap

In Theatres

Cars - another Pixar success, albeit perhaps not at the same level as past megablockbusters like The Incredibles. Still, a great story, funny, sweet. And good animation too. And funny credits. :)

Nacho Libre - peculiar. Good, but not spectacular. Super-wacky - take, for instance, the point at which (SPOILERS!) Nacho hurls an ear of corn with all his might and lodges it firmly in some guy's eye socket, or when he flys at the end.

Superman Returns - awesome movie. Epic, a tribute to the originals. Great special effects, funny, good music, especially John Williams' classic theme.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - another excellent movie; another time I disagree with certain critics. Too long? Nah; I thought it was the perfect length! (I think I'm pretty much alone, even among otherwise positive critics, in saying that.) Confusing plot? No, but complicated; still, you can follow it. (At least, I could.) And ILM's VFX were great, to the point that many reviewers mistakenly referred to the all-digital villian Davy Jones as being done with prosthetics and makeup.

Oldies

Terminator - dated, but interesting. Pretty good overall. Lackluster special effects compared to today's flicks, but good for the time; stop-motion Terminator was painful, though.

T2: Judgement Day - much better. ILM's liquid-metal morphing holds up admirably to this day. Good story, characters, etc.

T3: Rise of the Machines - James Cameron is sorely missed. Execution is lacking; characters are, mm, so-so. But effects are great. I love the fact that this guy is now CA's governator.

Casablanca - a classic. Funny, well-written, enjoyable... it's amazing how many great quotes there are. "Here's lookin' at you, kid." "Play it [NOT 'again'] Sam." "I'm shocked - SHOCKED..." "Round up the usual suspects." "We'll always have Paris." "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Alien - wow, slow pacing compared to today's movies. But good.

Happy 10th Birthday, MSNBC!

My #1 online news site from the start, here's to a great ten years and ten thousand more to come.



...wait, ten thousand is a lot of years, maybe I'll stick to "ten more to come" for now and see where we are at that point. But still, you're a great site. Good news, good video, good layout. Keep it up, pal. :D

Out of School!

Today I got out of school for the year - woohoo! (Nonetheless, it feels very, very strange.)

I also saw Pearl Harbor for the first time... well, the first half of it, at least. :) I knew going into it that it was a long movie, about 3 hours, I think. And so, when FDR's address to Congress came to a close and the screen faded to black, I thought, "Hm, good movie, pretty long." And then... "Intermission. Please Insert Disc 2." I could barely believe it.

So I'll have to finish that another time. It's all right... I think I have a lot of time ahead of me. :)

Windows Live Messenger to gain Xbox Live Friends functionality?

Last week (I think), I noticed for the first time that Windows Live/MSN Messenger's Xbox tab no longer displayed online friends. Back just before E3, Xbox.com debuted a feature that allows PC users on the site to send and receive messages over the Xbox Live service. And Windows Live Messenger, the biggest update to Messenger in, well, a while, will likely exit Beta sometime this summer. And Microsoft has always talked about increasing PC-to-Xbox connectivity, especially at E3 with the news that "Live Anywhere" would essentially give cell phones and Windows Vista PCs Xbox Live functionality.

Together, all of this points toward one thing: that the final release of Windows Live Messenger will display your Xbox Live Friends as part of the main buddy list, and that you'll be able to carry on limited conversations with them. At least, that's what I think... and hope. Equal parts educated guess and wishful thinking, perhaps. But it certainly seems possible, considering the evidence.

Fon

Check out Fon. Very cool, and potentially quite useful too. Basically, if you set up your WiFi router with their software, you essentially donate your WiFi coverage to the Fon network, and in return you get free access to everyone else's Fon-enabled routers. (Conversely, you can choose to pay for access elsewhere and get paid when people use your router.)

Halo 3

For the past three days, Halo 3 is practically all that I can think about. Well, not really, but I have thought about it a lot. Why? See for youself. (NOTE: Prepare to be confused if you haven't played 1 or 2.)

E3 is underway now, and so far it's yielded some pretty incredible stuff. Take, for example, Microsoft's new "Live Anywhere," which will bring Xbox Live to your PC and cell phone. Whenever Vista finally launches, it'll do so with basic Live capabilities and at least one game, Shadowrun, capable of being played across platforms - PC vs. Xbox 360. Very cool... very cool indeed.

I'll update with more later, if I can remember... in the mean time, go watch the H3 trailer again. :)

Fun Links

360 Voice
Give your Xbox a blog of its own.

ROBO-ONE in the Space!
Actually planned for 2010.

David Hasselhoff
Singing.

Leonard Nimoy
Singing some more.

Back from Disney World

Mere hours ago I returned on a Song 757 from Orlando, Florida, where I had been at Disney World since Sunday. Go Mickey! :) Here are some of the rides I went on:

Epcot

Test Track
Get in a car. Go fast.

Animal Kingdom

Kilimanjaro Safari
We saw lions, elephants, alligators, rhinos, hippos, and much more.

Magic Kingdom

It's a Small World
Creepy yet classic.

Big Thunder Mountain
The biggest rollercoaster I'm willing to go on. I actually videotaped the whole thing -- well, videocarded I suppose, since it's on a xD card instead of a tape -- so with luck I'll get that online for all to see sometime soon.

Disney MGM Studios

Star Tours [x4]
It's Star Wars. Need I say more? Now complete with a giant water-blasting AT-AT standing guard outside in a recreation of one small piece of Endor, take the vacation of a lifetime to the idyllic forest moon. Along the way, though, there may be a detour or two... :) First you board the Star Tours Express, a ship seating maybe 50 people (they have six of them). All the action is seen throught the forward viewport, aka a large screen. :) The entire ship is mounted on a gimbal so that it can shake and move with the action onscreen.

Backlot Tour
Take a look at some of what goes into making a movie. See prop warehouses, costume design shops, and live pyrotechnics and water effects. Watch a select few lucky parkgoers make their own "Harbor Attack" minimovie.

Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular
Similar to the Backlot Tour, we saw many of the stunts and action pieces from Raiders of the Lost Ark, live.

Lights Motors Action [x2]
Cars! Motorcycles! Stunts! Jumps! Explosions! Again along the same lines as the Backlot Tour and Indiana Jones, this show takes you behind-the-scenes of producing a movie car chase scene. It'll give you a whole new level of appreciation for what goes into that kind of thing.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Play It! [x2]
In an authentic Millionaire set, complete with music, spinning lights and everything, compete for the chance to sit in the hot seat. No, you're not playing for a million dollars, but you are

Downtown Disney

Cirque du Soleil - La Nouba
Wow. Very cool bicycling, trampolining, spinning, jumping, and so on. These people are incredibly skilled.

Spring Break, Oblivion, & Disney World!

I just saw the Godfather (part one) for the first time. Good movie... pretty long, too. It must have had half a dozen different climaxes. In the car ride home, we were all kind of checking the seat behind us nervously to make sure no one was going to... uhh... get revenge or anything....

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For the past week I've been on Spring Break... woohoo! :) I've been getting some good web site work done... maybe by the end of next week I'll have put some parts online.

That's going to be waylayed, though, by a "trip out of the country," as my dad calls it -- a trip to the self-contained, totalitarian microworld known as Disney World. (Seriously, they should secede from the Union.)

What'll my favorite attraction be? Why, same as last year, of course - Star Tours! :D

If I have a chance, maybe I'll report live from the Mouse Front. Or not. We're being airlifted in at 08:00, or something like that. I'll send in a little report afterwards, at least... well, if I remember. :)

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So what have I been doing for the past week, aside from web work and prepping for insertion? Living in an entirely different world. Well, in the few spare minutes when my brother isn't. :)

That world is Nirn, specifically the 16 square mile Cyrodiil province as seen in the RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, available now for Xbox 360 and PC. (The second installment is remembered for an environment twice the size of Great Britain, but the land in Oblivion is much more varied.)

This game has earned almost universal 9/10 reviews or higher. Complaints about framerate or load times are not totally without reason, but are an utter non-issue. If you play this game, trust me, you won't care either. It's just... well, HUGE, and it presents endless possibilities. Buy and sell; barter; buy a house; buy a horse; steal a horse; go to jail; break out of jail; repeat.

Jail is actually kind of fun, which I suppose is a bad moral for kids to learn. ;) You can try to pick the lock, which is hard -- harder in the bigger prisons, like the Imperial City Prison. You could also try pickpocketing the key off the guard. (But if you do and you're recaptured, watch out, 'cause they're not dumb enough to give him the key the second time.) In smaller cities you might be paired with a jailmate. I once escaped by starting a fight with another prisoner and then running out the door as the guard came in to intervene.

I could go on for hours. Many reviewers do. Google it; you'll find some. If you have an Xbox 360, I highly recommend it; if you have a PC, chances are you won't be able to run it. But if you have a state-of-the-art computer that can handle the graphics and physics, go for it. :)

Office Live: New Web Site

Remember how I mentioned Office Live in my last post? Well, on Thursday I was lucky enough to get into the beta. The result is a new web site: www.tucklyne.com, for my family's ultrasmall business that does virtually nothing.

The online site-building tools are easy-to-use, powerful, and flexible. I was able to get a fairly good-looking site online in minutes. You can add images, documents, and little provided modules that give weather info, maps, stock quotes, slide shows, and more. You can create infinite pages, and organize them all under different sections and such.

You can give other people permission to edit the site, and create up to five email addresses "@tucklyne.com". You also get detailed reports of site traffic. See either visits or unique visitors with bar charts -- per hour, per day, per month, or during whatever time period you specify. See pie charts of what percentage of your visitors use what operating system, browser, and screen resolution.

And remember: all of this is for free. I didn't pay a cent for anything mentioned above. There's a waiting list for the beta now, but apparently already over 10,000 small businesses have been let in. Once this launches for real, it'll be a great resource. If you want even more, you can pay for it -- more storage (like you'd need it), more email addresses, additional domain names, online business management software, shared online storage, and more. Very, very, very cool.

A note of warning, though: Office Live hijacks your Hotmail somewhat. While you're logged in to Office Live, the Hotmail logos change to Office Live Mail and the MSN links change to Office Live links. This may now be one of the issues preventing me from entering the Windows Live Mail beta, which is really too bad. Overall, though, it's a great service, and awesome for small businesses with no previous web presence.

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It's interesting timing for me, because my main web site (tophtucker.com) just went down. I'm working on a new version now... I'll report back as I make more progress.

A Good Couple of Weeks for Microsoft

Microsoft seems to be on a roll. Over the past couple weeks they've launched a lot of new stuff, including a fair amount today alone.

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WINDOWS

1) Windows Vista February CTP

Microsoft released a generally feature-complete version of Vista. It's now looking pretty good... very good, actually. :) I just watched a video on its speech recognition capabilties; very cool. You can browse the web, open programs, and (of course) dictate easily. You don't need to switch between commands and dictation, like you do in today's Office (to an extent).* Just say "Start... Microsoft Word... the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," and it'll know what to do. Of course, that's just one of tons of cool features, from improved security (build-in spyware protection, firewall, kernel improvements, etc.) to better graphical capabilities (Aero) to more multimedia functions (WMP 11, Photo Gallery) to lots lots more.

* I have Office 2002; I'm not sure if anything's been improved in Office 2003.

WINDOWS LIVE

1) Live.com

This is one of the more minor upgrades; it's been getting little aesthetic updates here and there, which bring it more into line with other coming products. But, due to the open nature of Gadgets, the capabilities of this page are growing all the time.

2) Live Contacts

"Subscribe" to your friends' Live Contacts, and your info will automatically be updated whenever they get a new phone number, address, job... whatever. It's like Plaxo, only integrated into the rest of MSN and Windows Live.

3) Windows Live Local Tech Preview

This is very rough, occasionally glitchy, and incomplete, but it sure is cool! Drive around Seattle or San Francisco at street level. Very neat. Check it out.

4) Windows Live Messenger

They just rolled out a new update today, with a cleaner look, Live Contacts support, and more. Since the first beta, WLM has let users share files in Sharing Folders -- when one or the other person updates the file, it updates for both of them. Perfect for collaboration on group projects.

5) Windows Live Expo

Think craiglist + social networking + other stuff. I'm new to it, and not exactly an expert on all the craigslist stuff either, so I can't make any fair comparisons. But it's pretty neat. Search for product listings, and filter them by geographical or social (friends etc.) proximity. Get all results listed on a map. And drag stuff around. Like dialog boxes. Kinda pointless, but kinda cool. :)

OFFICE LIVE

While at the moment a pretty limited beta, get on the waiting list now, 'cause it's looking like an extremely useful product. Microsoft will actually give you your own domain name (www.youname.com, whatever...) for FREE and help you build a slick corporate online presence. You get email addresses and traffic reports too. For a small fee you get even more... check out the site to learn all about it and sign up quick.

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It's a pretty exciting time... :D

The Popcorn Guy ("Popcorn Bob") is back!

Today I discovered the most amazing and wonderful thing. Now, you faithful readers of this blog (if there are any) will know that I have long lamented the tragic loss of the Popcorn Guy when AMC bought General Cinemas almost four years ago.

That was March 2002. At the beginning of the new school year that fall, a couple friends and I noticed workmen dismantling the once-glorious Popcorn Bob sign on the face of our local General Cinemas 5. Today the pretentious - even downright EVIL - Filmstrip Man "Clip" stands atop Popcorn Bob's rightful throne.

As a sidenote, I just now noticed that AMC has just closed a deal to acquire Loews, too. Who knows what poor animated cartoon mascots will be mercilessly murdered in THAT transaction.

In any case, back to my wonderful discovery -- a copy of the mini-movie that used to precede every GCC movie. Here it is now, for all to see, courtesy of the kind and generous "pugpapaokc":



Enjoy. I know I have.

Until next time,
Toph Tucker
Loyal Devotee of the Church of Popcorn Bob

Web Site Version 5.0 & BSEC

I am happy to report that I am now hard at work on the next version of my web site. "Wait," you say -- "you haven't even finished upgrading 3 to 4!" I know, I know, but version four was already showing its age, and the design needed to be cleaned up. The new Flash home page improved things (certainly in terms of design, at least), but a couple people told be they couldn't see it for lack of Flash. It was a hard choice to abandon Flash for version 5.0, and I'll miss the animation capabilities, but in the end I think it will be nicer and more useful.

Gone is the strange color scheme, replaced by a theme reminiscent (for me at least) of Windows Live. Gone is the bad navigation, which improved in 4.0 but became pointless when 2/3 of the pages didn't yet exist. And here for the first time is a live feed from this very blog. This will make it easier for me to update the home page, and easier for you to stay up-to-date on all things Toph... not that anyone wants to... :)

Also, I've lapsed somewhat in my blogging efforts lately, averaging about one post per month. The BSEC blog, on the other hand, is doing pretty well. (BSEC stands for Beaver Science and Engineering Club, the rocket & robotics club at my school.) Check out the site for some new videos of our recent egg-drop (more like egg-smash) contest.

Homework: A Neccessary Evil?

It's certainly evil, and it's certainly not ALL neccessary.

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050731/NEWS010202/507310367

"'Usually I get home and I eat dinner and do homework until I go to bed,' which is typically 9:30 p.m., Rebekah said. ... Such is the plight of today's active student ..."

9:30!? I wish... even in 8th grade that would've been pretty early for me, and I was getting home at 3:40, not 6:00.

"Lucian Doyle said he gives reading assignments to his biology students at Fairdale High School so they will seek answers to homework questions in the text. That reinforces what he's teaching in class and, he hopes, encourages students to seek more information on a subject."

How in the world are we supposed to seek more information when we barely have time to get through what we have!? I'd love to study more about quarks, or the histroy of Belgium, or the Iroquois Confederacy, but I have no time. Homework eats up hours that could be spent researching more interesting things -- not to mention, well, sleeping for once.

"'It seems like teachers don't realize we have other classes,' Stephanie said."

Quite true. At least, they don't seem to talk to each other enough.

"Many students hold part-time jobs and participate in extracurricular activities, and Doyle said he wouldn't necessarily encourage them to drop those. In fact, he said he wishes more students had extracurricular activities."

Yes! So do we! But we can't because of your homework!

"Doyle's advice: Never get behind."

Again, quite true, but easier said than done. What do you do when you have pneumonia, miss a week of classes, and return to find three different huge projects going on at the same time?

Now, the article says, "Teachers give homework for several reasons, the National PTA says. The reasons include helping students review what's covered in class and giving teachers a way to check whether students understand the lessons." Right. Got it. So how about making amount of homework inversely proportional to class performance?

And while you're at it, base it on the Xbox Live TrueSkill Ranking system. After all, you shouldn't neccessarily be overwhelmed with homework after one little slip-up, and with TrueSkill it can all be a bit more steady. If you get a bunch of homework for, say, Science -- and do it all -- you're probably going to do well on that test, since you know the material so well. So then you won't have homework for a while. Then, when the next test comes along, you'll do badly because you haven't been doing anything on it. That's why you don't want sudden jumps and DO want pretty frequent evaluations -- the TrueSkill rank can take into account homework, too, not just quizzes and tests. So, yes, homework must remain in some form -- but perhaps the load could at least be lightened somewhat.

All in favor say "aye."

(Aye!)

Logo Craze

What's up with all these logos popping up everywhere? Sprint I can understand; that was a merger, and I think it compares the two company's former identities pretty well. AT&T? Same thing. But then Intel, and now Kodak? What's wrong with old logos!? I liked them!

(In other news, more substantial news is hopefully coming soon. Maybe. If you're lucky.)

EDIT: And how could I forget AOL!? Cingular, too, to some extent. This may be going on all the time, but I feel like the past year has seen an unusual turnover in corporate identity. And they all update it in much the same way.

EDIT 2: And how could I forget LucasArts and much of the rest of Lucasfilm? And what about UbiSoft -- how long ago was that? Nah, too long ago to count... but do you see my point? Some of these updates are good, but some -- Kodak and Intel, I'd say -- go too far.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Last night I went to the 12:01 showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Quite good, I'd say! :) The theater was packed, the crowd was excited, and there was one movie trailer that I'll never, ever forget... hehehe, it was hilarious. But I can't say what it was... because that would spoil it!

I'll update with more impressions later.

Happy Birthday Toph!

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to Toph,
Happy Birthday to me!

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Woohoo! Today's my birthday! And, in honor of that, I though I'd give a long-overdue update on the state of things.

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MOVIES That I've Recently Seen
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Flightplan

Flightplan really capitalizes on the current national state of mind, and it ended up as a pretty good, if not spectacular, movie. There are a few very thought-provoking moments, and it sure keeps you guessing.

Well, it kept me guessing, at least. :)

Serenity

The first thing I thought about this movie is, "Wow. That doesn't sound like a sci-fi movie name." I'm suppose I'm used to something as blunt as "Star Wars." :)

Speaking of which, Serenity has a number of sequences that appear to be largely inspired by SW, and it has a similar overall feel, albeit with some very, very brief moments that lean more towards the "horror" genre. A few things for SW fans to look out for:

• Serenity itself is very Millenium Falcon-esque, and the captain is very Solo-esque.
• Space sequences seem very reminiscent of the Episode III space battle...
  ...especially the end.
• Highly recommended for any sci-fi fan.

In Her Shoes

This isn't typically the kind of movie I would go to. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I won't waste too much time describing it, aside from saying that it does a pretty good job of what it's meant to do.

Elizabethtown

Again, I probably wouldn't see this normally. But I did like it. It's awfully reminiscent of Garden State in a number of ways, while remaining unique and funny. And an excuse for popcorn is always enjoyable. :)

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WEBSITE Version 5.0 on its way
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As I've said before, I'm somewhat dissatisfied with version 4.0 of my web site (which I haven't even completed, by the way). So I'm abandoning it. It didn't really accomplish the task at hand -- that is, to clean up and organize the site -- and I don't quite like the design, although I do think it's an improvement in many ways.

Just like the early stages of version 4.o, expect 5.0 to come in bits, starting with the mere skeleton of a site and then building up to its v.3 glory and beyond.

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I must be off now, so fare thee well. :)

School, Rockets, Segways & Websites

Well, school has started again. It's been pretty good so far -- and the BSEC has been born. :D

Standing for either "Beaver Science and Engineering Club" or "Beaver Society for Environmental Catastrophe," the BSEC is a new club I've founded with a couple friends. We're focusing primarily on rocket, potato guns, and robots. Hehe... it should be fun. :)

However, the most exciting news of the past few weeks is that I got to ride a Segway! Last weekend the Third Annual AltWheels Transportation Festival took place at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum. My Phyiscs teacher suggested I go at the last minute, and I sure am glad I did! Seascoast Fun Rides (website under construction) was giving 5-minute Segway demos on a p-Series. I got to go on one -- it was really, really fun!

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I'm currently in the conceptual stages of redesigning my website... again. Yes, I'm unsatisfied with version 4.0, which isn't really even done yet. The new site will feature a more unified look across all pages, including the home page, which is currently a random Flash thing. I think I'll have a quick Flash intro, but have the regular site be mainly just good old HTML.

I'm also hoping to get this blog on the front page, if I can ever figure out how... I need a web-based RSS newsreader... hmm...

Last Day of Summer

Three posts all summer long. Not so great, eh? Well, school -- yes, dreaded school -- is now upon me. I have just over eight hours left until I begin. It's been less than one since I finished my summer reading. Fortunately, I ended on a good note -- Rocket Boys, which inspired the movie October Sky.

While I haven't been a reliable blogger, I have still kept track of my summer. Oh yes indeed. It's probably my most well-documented summer ever. It's just that the documentation has yet to be sorted out. Perhaps, if I ever find some free time, I shall "retro-blog" as I said I would in my last post.

One last thing, before I retire for the night. In honor of the summer of 2005 drawing to a close, I have renamed this blog from the faux-egotistic and initially-temporary title of "Toph's Awesome Blog." It is now entitled, quite simply, "Toph Tucker." It matches my website better, and -- with luck -- eventually this site will match that one in style as well.

That is all for now. Happy September, and fare thee well.

Two Years Old

As of Wednesday, my blog is exactly two years old! Wohoo! Wanna know why I missed it? Probably 'cause I haven't posted here in over a month. Sorry about that. :( Here are some quick updates.

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Half Blood Prince

I went to Barnes & Noble at midnight and got the new Harry Potter, and finished it three days later. That's the fastest I've ever read a Harry Potter book, and (I think) the second-fastest I've read any book. It was quite good, albeit sad... well, that's all I have time for now.

Website

I uploaded some minor changes to my site yesterday, including a revised home page. Check it out. More changes coming at the end of the summer, although I'm thinking of giving up on this version -- too messy, really, and I still haven't gotten it all working -- and skipping on to a very similar version 5.0.

Taconnet

Mere minutes from now I'll be on the road, heading for a wedding in New Hampshire. From there, on Sunday, we'll be going on to Taconnet. So I'll be relatively out of touch for the next month or so.

Retro-Blog

I have been keeping track of what I've been doing this summer... just not here. :) So I've been thinking of "retro-blogging" -- altering the time & date manually to make it look like I actually have been posting all this time. If I do, though, I'll put a little disclaimer towards the bottom.

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Okay, gotta go. Fare thee well.

Last Day of School

Wow... I've been so busy lately I've barely been updating at all. Since my last update, I've studied for endless hours for exams, taken my exams, gotten my exams back, and -- today -- had my last day of school. I'm now, officially, a 10th grader... at least, that's what they say. I'd actually lean towards calling myself a 9th grader.

Gotta go... bed time. Late, it is. To bed I must go.

Xbox 360, Movies, and More

It's been an extremely exciting and busy time lately. For the biggest reason, head over to my new Star Wars blog, which is replacing the old Blogger one. Yes, Episode III has come out, and yes, it's awesome!!! :-D

In addition to seeing Revenge of the Sith six times so far, I've been swamped by homework, projects, and exam review. Here's my attempt at a worthy blog update.

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Xbox 360

You know it's been a long time indeed when a whole new console has been announced and I haven't said a word about it.

Xbox 360 was officially launched during an MTV event that aired May 12th. Then, at E3, they revealed more information... kind of. The launch has been somewhat underwhelming, but there's sure to be plenty of new information as the launch -- this fall -- approaches.

It seems like X360 is going to be slightly less powerful than the PS3 this time around, but they're very, very close. That's interesting, since PS3 is launching 1/2 a year later. Hopefully the power differential will be balanced out by X360 being easier to develop for than the PS3.

A couple of promising games thus far include Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing 3, and, of course, Perfect Dark Zero. (What a weird name.) Also, it's been suggested that Halo 3 will launch day-and-date with PS3, which, personally, I find hilarious. Take that, Sony!

Backwards compatibility? Check... kind of. Word is X360 will support compatibility with only the best-selling games from the original Xbox. No, that makes no sense, but whatever. ;-)

One category in which X360 clearly has PS3 beat is online gaming. From micro-transactions to the marketplace to downloadable content to video chat to Live Arcade, persistent Gamer Card, reputation & stats... X360 looks to blow PS3 out of the water. You'll be able to create your own content and put it online for others to "buy" from you, as well as buy other people's custom work. Having one unified online persona really has its benefits.

Every connected X360 will have access to "Xbox Live Silver," which is basically all the features of Xbox Live but online gaming. "Ha ha," you say, "well what does that leave?" Stats, gamer ID, content download... a lot more than non-Live subscribers have today, that's for sure! Subscribe and you'll get Xbox Live Gold, which adds actual online gaming. It looks like some X360 games could get as many as 64 gamers per game, and I have no doubt someone will exceed that after a year or two.

Xbox 360 will also have Media Extender functionality built-in. Basically, that means you can stream video, music, photos and more from your Media Center PC and access it all from your Xbox. That means that, even without the optional, removable, upgradable hard drive, you can get Custom Soundtracks in every single game.

X360 versus PS3, I'd definitely go with X360. I expect the power & graphical differences to be negligible, and online/Media Center capabilities make up for all that. For more information, check out...
- IGN Xbox 360
- TeamXbox
- Xbox.com
- Xbox360.com

Movies

No, I won't mention a certain sci-fi epic. You can read plenty about that at my other blog. However, a couple weekends ago -- Saturday the 14th of May, if I'm not mistaken -- I saw Kicking and Screaming in theaters with my friend, and then went back to his house and saw Collateral. I couldn't find two more different movies if I tried. The former was pretty funny, although not extraordinary. The latter was very serious, though, and rather gruesome. It was good, though. Well done.

Constitution Day

"WASHINGTON - The Constitution long has ensured that Congress can’t tell schools what to teach. But that’s no longer the case for at least one topic — the Constitution itself."

That just about says it all. Click here for more.

Dreams

Last night I dreamt a little group of neighbors, including me, cleansed the neighborhood of all wildlife and then re-introduced only our favorite animals -- which, strangely enough, happened to include a giant man-eating frog. It got loose and started scaring people off. I think that's when I woke up.

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Gotta get back to History now. I've probably spent too much time on it as is. Fare thee well... and do yourself a favor and go see Episode III!!!

SAT IIs

Today I took the SAT II Physics test. Fun. Not. I didn't even finish the test. Oh well... I'm glad it's over.

Forza, SAT IIs, and New York, oh my!

Today we finally got Forza Motorsport, which I actually got for Christmas but which didn't come out until this week. I've barely gotten to play at all, but so far it's great! You can customize you car in I'd say about a duotrigintillion ways. In addition, you can use the "Drivatar" technology to train your own AI driver who drives just like you do, and then have your Drivatar race for you in races you don't want to do yourself. You can also race against your own Drivatar, which is cool. Forza also supports split-screen and Xbox LIVE play.

(I've loved racing games on Xbox ever since the original Project Gotham Racing, which was one of the very first games we got.)

In other news, I'm taking the SAT II in Physics this Saturday. Fun. Not. And my brother's going to New York tomorrow with the 7th grade, just like I did two years ago. They stay until Friday. (Friday the 9th grade also has a field trip: going to a Red Sox game!)

I have to go to bed now. So bye. :-)

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish

Today we saw the 5:30 show of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I liked it, although I don't think it lives up to the book. Still, it does an admirable job. I thought the casting was great, and the opening scene is hilarious. It's a fun movie -- I'd recommend it.

Tests and Weekends

First of all, I had three tests today. Actually, I technically had only one, but I also had a quiz and an exam. (Quiz in Spanish, Test in Geometry, and Exam in History.) They weren't too bad, but still - it's a bit much, I think.

Second of all, I realize I never wrote up an overview of my long weekend, so here goes.

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Friday

We went to Fever Pitch for the second time, which was fun. We saw the Episode III trailer again -- my fifth time in theaters -- which was even better. (We didn't have Friday off, mind you.)

Saturday

We went to my older sister's birthday party.

Sunday

First we went to my cousin's First Communion, and then to the after party at his house. That night we went to another birthday, this one for a family friend. That took up pretty much the whole day, but I got some good reading in what with all the commuting. Actually, I got quite a bit of reading done almost every day of the long weekend.

Monday

Patriot's Day! Every year we've always gone to a parade out in Concord (where my grandparents live) and then to watch the marathon at Heartbreak Hill. This year we managed to get Red Sox tickets and went with a few friends! The marathon route passes very close to Fenway, so we stopped by before leaving and watched for about 30 seconds, as opposed to several hours last year. When we got back there was some Xbox to be had, and then a little game of baseball with those same friends we went to the actual game with. Ugh.

Tuesday

Web site work, which I had also done some of the other four days, and homework. I was up pretty late, so now I'm tired.

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That long weekend made this a three-day week for me! Last week was also a short week, but for a different reason -- I was out sick on Wednesday.

I have to go do homework now. Fare thee well.

Congrats to the New Pope

Congratulations to Pope Benedict XVI. I'm sure it's no coincidence that he was chosen exactly one month before Episode III is released. :-)

New Tophtucker.com Home Page!!!

I've just completed and uploaded a brand-new Tophtucker.com home page, unlike any it's ever had before. Complete with a Star Wars theme to celebrate one month until Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, it's done entirely in Flash. Check it out!

(I've also completed miscellaneous other updates around the site.)

I worked on the new home page some last weekend, but I did most of it over the long weekend -- we had today and yesterday off form school. Anyway, enjoy the new look, and tell me what you think!

Fever Pitch

I just saw Fever Pitch tonight, and it was great! They also had the Episode III trailer playing before it, which was a nice surprise. :-)

End of Vacation

At 8:00 tomorrow, I must go to school. Grr. Silly school.

Oh well... I actually got some web site stuff done today! And saw Miss Congeniality 2, which was pretty good.

Abduction!!!

Just this morning, I was abducted by evil aliens trying to take over the world!!! They broke into my bedroom through the window at 4:00 this morning, while everyone else was still asleep. They grabbed me from my bed, immobolized me with some kind of stunner, and then loaded me onto a hovercraft that was hovering outside my window. At that point the commotion woke up my brother, who came in to see what was happening. They stunned him, too, and then flew off to their mothership with me!

Once onboard, I was interrogated by their Supreme Overlord. He asked me all sorts of random questions -- how old I was, what my hobbies were, and so on. Just then, right in the middle of the interrogation, there was a fire drill on the mothership! I couldn't believe my luck. We all walked calmly but quickly from the Overlord's chambers, just as we had been taught to do. As we were all lining up so the alien fire chief could take our attendance, I spotted an escape pod right next to me! While the rest of the aliens were preoccupied, I dove into the pod and slapped the eject button. (I couldn't read the alien writing, so I just pressed the most prominent button, and it worked!)

By the time they noticed I was gone, I was already re-entering Earth's atmosphere. They shot at me a couple times with their laser cannons, but I was too far out of range. I had made it! I had escaped!

I landed in a field in Virginia. Sadly, I didn't know how to operate the parachute or reverse thrusters or any other landing equipment the pod might have, so it was quite a hard impact. The pod totally destroyed the surrounding field and an adjacent pod -- I hear you can see the crater from space!

So anyway, now I'm back safely, but I'm going to be tried for involuntary manslaughter on a massive scale. Too bad... I'll try to keep you updated on any new happenings.

Hans Brinker

Another thing: we watched "Hans Brinker" tonight, which is a hilariously dated skating movie. The acting is, shall we say, sub-par. :-)

Walt Disney World

Just a couple hours ago we got back from Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It was very fun!!! Here's my report.

Day Zero (Thursday) -- Disney Board Walk

We arrived on Thursday, March 24. As soon as we got to our hotel room (roughly 18:45) I rushed to the TV to see if they had Cartoon Network so I could watch Chapter 24 of Star Wars: Clone Wars, which was on at 19:00. Tragically, they didn't. We got the laptop set up, though, and downloaded it from starwars.com soon thereafter. We also went outside and explored the area behind our hotel, called the Disney Board Walk. There "Jeff" pointed us in the direction of a little restaurant -- and arcade.

Day One (Friday) -- Disney-MGM Studios

We spent our first full day at MGM, which remains my favorite of all the different parks. There we went to see, among other things, "Star Tours," Indiana Jones, "Lights, Motors, Action," and the nightime spectacular "Fantasmic!"

Day Two (Saturday) -- Epcot

Our second day was spent at the land of the giant golf ball. We saw (among other things) "Honey I Shrank the Audience," "Muppetvision 3-D," and "Test Track," which I did not go on.

Day Three (Sunday) -- Magic Kingdom

The Magic Kingdom is probably the most famous of the Disney parks. We spent the morning at attractions like "Big Thunder Mountain," "Splash Mountain" (which I didn't go on), Buzz Lightyear, Indy go-karts, and the Country Bear Jamboree. We went back to our hotel by way of Epcot shortly after noon, and then returned at night for the amazing parade and fireworks. ("Sal" helped us out then with seating suggestions.)

Day Four (Monday) -- Disney-MGM Studios, Disney Board Walk

We returned to MGM on Monday, this time doing "Who Wants to be a Millionaire - Play it!" twice and even more "Star Tours." I went on Star Tours five times total duirng our vacation. Later in the day, we fully explored the Board Walk, again assisted (this time in our quest to learn more about Disney's navy) by Jeff. We rented a little pedal-powered buggy to ride around the lake on, which was quite an interesting experience.

Day Five (Tuesday)

That's today! We spent a bit of time on the Board Walk, then packed up and left. Disney World was lots of fun -- perhaps when I have a bit more time I'll go more in-depth with my opinions on it.

Disney World

In 24 hours, I will most likely be in our hotel room in Disney World. Again, I'll be sure to report in afterwards!

In other news:

Yesterday and the day before yesterday, my family did the exact same thing at night.

1. Watch the latest Clone Wars chapter
2. Eat dinner while...
3. ...watching The Incredibles

We finished The Incredibles yesterday. It's a very good movie, and the DVD has some absolutely hilarious extras, which we also watched last night. Note that when I was watching The Incredibles last Saturday, it was with some friends, separate from our little family watching campaign. :-)

Vacation

As of 14:10 this past Friday, I'm on vacation! This time, my family's actually going somewhere, which is rare for us. This Thursday we're flying down to Florida to Disney World! It'll be the first time my brother or I have gone.

I'll report in when we get back.

Movies

Over the past three days, I've seen parts or all of nine movies.

Friday:
The Perfect Score (all)
Carolina (some)
Ace Ventura (some)
Austin Powers (some)
Forrest Gump (all)

Saturday:
Millions (all)
The Incredibles (some)

Sunday:
Robots (all)
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (some)

The Perfect Score was weird. Forrest Gump was good. Millions was trippy. And Robots was very good, very funny, and very fun to watch.

Bed time... adios!

Xenon

Today, the first details surrounded the next-generation Xbox (code-named "Xenon") emerged at the Game Developer's Conference. Click here to see IGN's coverage. Sounds very cool indeed!!! :-)

Troy

We're studying Homer's work in History, and so our teacher suggested we watch Troy. It was pretty good.

Exams

Well, I had my two exams yesterday. They went all right, I didn't end up spending too much time on them.

The good news is: we got today off because of it. The bad news is: we would have had today off anyway, because of the snow. Why couldn't the snow wait just 24 hours!?!?!?

The bad news is made even worse by the fact the Middle School, for no apparent reason, got yesterday off -- they don't have exams. My brother Willy is part of the Middle School. I was fine with him getting Monday off, since I knew I would get today off, but now he's gotton both days off! Very unfair indeed. :-(

Dogs & Exams

Random Rosie Comment of the Day:

Boy, it's been a while since I've had one of those, hasn't it!? This entry, though, is actually largely about Rosie, and not so random...

This past Monday (which I had off... go presidents!) was the one-year-anniversary of us getting Rosie!!! I have some pictures that, with luck, will get on my web site sometime within the next year....

This past Tuesday was even more exciting -- our neighbors got a new cockapoo named Cooper! He's very cute. He met Rosie for the first time yesterday, which was very entertaining -- Cooper kept on hiding under the chairs, where Rosie couldn't get at him, and then jumping out and attacking Rosie's cheek, neck, or tail. Rosie, in turn, would paw at Cooper, occasionally trapping him.

Exams:

This Monday we have our first exams of the year. You see, we have each class for two out of the three trimesters, so we have our first exams 2/3 through the year. Fortunately, I have only two on Monday: Physics and Freshman Seminar. In fact, I really only have one (to study for, at least), because the Freshman Seminar one is almost exclusively opinion-based.

I'm certainly not looking forward to the end of the year, when I'll have four. :-(

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! :-) Valentine's Day means candy, and candy means goodness... yay!

Today at school we got our Math tests back. As a matter of policy, I don't state my grades, but I will say that I've gotten the exact same score percentage-wise on this Math test, our recent History quiz (both were last Friday -- we got the History quizzes back 15 minutes after taking them), and the History test before that. Crazy, isn't it?

However, my Math score looks like it's about to be overturned due to some noble arguing by a few of my classmates and I regarding question #16 during class today while reviewing the test. Here's the problem. (Specifics may be off, but the gist of it is right.)

Line AB is congruent to line BC. Line AD is congruent to line BD. Line CD is a perpendicular bisector of line AB. True or false.

I say false -- you can draw it so it's either way, so it's false. The teacher says true. What do you say?

Patriot's Parade = No School!

Since the Patriots Parade is today, we were told that, if we had permission from our parents, we didn't have to go to school today! Yippee! :-) I would have gone, but we'd get nothing done in class anyway with so few people.

Go Pats! :-)

SUPER BOWL CHAMPS!!!

Congratulations to the good ol' New England Patriots, winners of Super Bowl XXXIX!!! YIPPEE!!! Four championships in as many years for New England... not too bad! :-)

Feel like checking who won the last 38? Head on over to MSN Search (advertised today during the game) and search "Who won Super Bowl [insert number here]?"

GO PATS!

More Mirrors

We've actually just started studying mirrors in physics class (what a coincidence!), and I'm rapidly losing confidence in my explanation of why objects in mirrors are closer than they appear. It still makes a tiny bit of sense, though -- in a strange, pointless kind of way... ;-)

Additionally, I'm now reaching greater understanding of the part mirror curvature plays in image size. For a long time I've had a basic understanting of how the light bends differently because of the curve, but only now am I learning about focal points and focal length and such. Light is an extremely interesting subject. :-)

Enough of this light enlightenment... back to Spanish homeowork. :-(

More Sledding, "Kiss me Kate"

This past Saturday I started the day off with a trip to the bookstore. Next I went sledding at the same place I went last week. Much of my old camp remained, though the new snow had made it a bit harder to see.

This time I actually sledded a bit more, but I also spent a lot of time building a nice little snow tunnel with a neighbor of ours. (His younger brother was there, too, but he was sledding most of the time.) The snow's deep enough that we could build a nice deep tunnel with a sturdy roof and not have to increase the natural depth of the snow at all. :-)

Last night we went to my uncle's school's production of Kiss Me, Kate, which was good. It had a couple of especially funny parts, such as a random wandering donkey and a nice little dead bird!

School & Snow

Despite rampant AIM-based speculation to the contrary, we did have school today. Oh well. Yesterday's snow day was very enjoyable -- my younger brother's friend came over and we played videogames (Halo 2 & Mercenaries) and went sledding.

Almost the entire time they were sledding, I was working on a little base camp at the top of the hill (so would it be a... umm... summit camp?). I flattened out a pretty big area -- plenty of room for the three enough, with plenty of room for a couple more. The flattening was crucial -- there was so much so it was next to impossible to walk otherwise. I then created custom-made spots for out tubes. I also defined the top of our run, complete with a queue area. I also made an elevated flattened area -- the "Snow City Cafe." There I had three little bowl-shaped indents in the snow for eating our M&Ms out of. :-)

Videogaming was also, of course, plenty of fun. I had one particularly great solo game (meaning my brother & his friend were doing something else) of Team Fiesta on Beaver Creek. I ended up winning the game for our team with 20 kills. At the end, I was doing really well with a rocket launcher -- I was so proud of myself. :-)

Super Bowl and Snow Day!!!

The Patriots are going to the Super Bowl!!! :-)

And -- it can't get much better than this -- we even have a snow day tomorrow because of all the... well... snow! I've had very few full weeks recently -- last week we had Monday off for MLK Jr. day and Tuesday off for Parent/Teacher Conferences! We have about two feet of snow here. It's amazing!

GO PATS!!!

Mirrors and Mercs

Thursdays and Tuesdays at school for me are double-block days -- we have only two classes (not counting Art), but we have each for twice as long. That means 2-hour classes. Fortunately, we're given a ten or fifteen minute break in the middle of class so that we don't get quite so worn out.

This past Thursday I had Geometry for the last two hours of school. During our break, I suddenly realized something I had never known before: why objects in mirrors are closer than they appear. Coming back from the break, I burst back into class and said, "I know why objects in mirrors are closer than they appear!" The two other kids in the classroom at the time seemed a tad bit confused as to why I was randomly saying such a thing. I explained it to them, and then to a few other kids as they got back from break. I was exceptionally excited about my discovery, but no one else really cared that much. ;-)

Anyway, here's why objects in mirrors are closer than they appear.

.......................3 feet.............................
YOU -------------------- MIRROR

You're only three feet away from the mirror, but the light has to go there and back again.

YOU -------------------> MIRROR
..........<-------------------.................

Thus, those three feet are doubled! Get it? Pretty cool, huh? The effect is exaggerated in a car, since you're not looking at yourself -- you're looking at something else farther back.

..........................................YOU --------> MIRROR
OTHER CAR <------------------------ ................

Late last Tuesday night we got the LucasArts game Mercenaries, but I just had my first chance to play it today. (Willy's been playing it all week, and he's still only a little more than a quarter through the game.) It's awesome! I highly recommend it.

The game takes place in at least 2008. Australian forces uncovered a North Korean nuclear weapons cache, and the Allied Nations (basically a new UN) pours into Korea to take out this new threat. Your goal in the game is to capture or kill (capture is preferred) the "deck of 52" -- 52 North Korean leaders. There are also several side-quests -- races, challenges, et cetera.

So far, though, I haven't really played the main game -- the only card I've captured is the Two of Clubs (at least I think it's clubs). Instead, I've had fun hijacking vehicles, demolishing cities with devastating airstrikes, and sending cars skyrocketing into the air with huge amounts of C4. You can also call in supply drops, where helicopters come and drop off weapons, vehicles (including fuel trucks, tanks, sports cars, and helicopters), and more.

The helicopters have this really cool retractable magnet clamp thing -- you deploy it and then it hangs beneath you, and then you can latch on & pick up anything from supply crates to civilian cars to tanks and other helicopters. Just make sure you don't try to get anything that's too heavy, or it'll end up dragging you down!

Again, I highly, highly recommend this game. :-D

10,000 Black Holes

10,000 or more black holes are now said to be orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*. Wow.

Cool Clock

Check this out. It's really cool! :-)

SNOW DAY!!!

Wahoo - it's a snow day!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)

Hmm, what to do... how about a mix of web site work, videogames (we got MechAssault 2 & it's great!), and homework? I'd say that's pretty likely.

Tophtucker.com v4.0 is ONLINE!!!

As of last night at about 11:45, the first parts of Tophtucker.com Version 4.0 are online. For information on some of the changes, click here. Since I'm not yet totally done with all the content, you may still stumble upon some old-style pages, broken links, and various other missing content. Over the next few weeks I'll be uploading the rest.

The updates to the TuckLyne section (including the Athena and TuckLyne Studios subsections), by the way, will be significantly farther off in the future, since that requires a whole new design. Note that TuckLyne itself will also be reorganization somewhat. There's a lot of stuff that's kind of hiding in the shadows, and that needs to be fixed. Just today I stumbled upon this section on the TuckLyne web site, which I don't remember AT ALL and which is thus completely out of date. I don't even know some of those people listed in the staff section! That's the stuff that needs to reorganized, merged into other divisions, or outright eliminated.

Well, it's dinner time for me, and then homework. Today was my first day of school after break... so sad... anyway, be sure to check out the new site! :-) Adios!

Vacation is pretty much over.

Well, today is my last day of vacation, which is extremely sad. While I don't have a good enough memory to remember what I did every single day, like I did for Thanksgiving break, here's an overview of what I did with dates when possible.

Dec. 17 (Friday):

This was our last day of school... yay! After school we went to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was pretty good.

Dec. 19 (Sunday):

Some friends came over, including a rocket scientist who helped us recover some files from a dead computer. ;-) Then we played a lot of Halo 2 - a lot of Halo 2. A lotalotalot. By the end of the night we had gotten pretty good!

Week One in General:

This week I did a lot of web site editing, reading, and Halo 2. :-) My brother came home from California, which was very nice! We ended up playing Halo 2 with a lot of different friends that week... it's a great game!!!

Dec. 24 (Friday):

On the 24th we went to a friend's house for a Christmas Eve party and generally got even more excited for Christmas. :-)

Dec. 25 (Saturday):

CHRISTMAS!!! :-) On Christmas we opened presents, talked with a lot of people who came over, and then went out to my grandparent's house in Concord to have a little family party.

I also started watching these funny Star Wars cartoons I got, "Droids." They're not meant to be funny... but they are. ;-)

Dec. 26 (Sunday):

We went to a nice little baptism in the morning and then a party at the family's house later at night. My younger brother and I also played a lot of Dance Dance Revolution with our older brother... actually, I was playing "Rome: Total War" most of the time! :-)

Week Two in General:

This week there was a lot less web site work being done. ;-) How could I get such things done with all that Christmas excitement?!?

Dec. 27 (Monday):

My older brother's flight back to California was scheduled for the 27th at about 6:00 AM, meaning we weren't expecting to see him at all on Monday. Fortunately, the snow cancelled his flight, so he ended up going home Tuesday instead!

Dec. 28 (Tuesday):

Willy's friend came over and they went sledding while I took over the world in Rise of Nations, which I had started playing the previous day.

Willy's friend ended up sleeping over, and that night we randomly met his brother online in Xbox LIVE!!! The chances of that happening are absolutely miniscule, yet it happened.

We alternated playing Xbox LIVE and watching more of the hilarious Star Wars cartoons. We also started watching "Battle for Endor," the second in a series of two live-action Ewok movies... we started with the second by accident.

Dec. 29 (Wednesday):

Rosie turned ONE!!! We had a little birthday celebration, complete with a cake that she couldn't eat. Oh well... she got little doggie treats instead.

I continued watching "Battle for Endor" and also saw a big of the first movie, "Caravan of Courage."

Dec. 30 (Thursday):

I worked on an old "TuckLyne Studios" production, "Survivor or Not," and also worked on a Special Edition of an animated Star Wars movie I did in 7th Grade as a book report for the book "X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar."

Dec. 31 (Friday):

I continued work on Starfighters of Adumar. That night, we had a few friends over for a New Year's Eve gathering. We watched Napoleon Dynamite, which is an incredibly strange movie. A little more than halfway through, at about 11:50 PM, we switched to ABC or CBS (I forget which... all I remember is that Regis Philbin was the host) for their New Year's Eve coverage.

JANUARY 1, 2005!!! (Saturday):

Happy New Year! We watched a bit more of the New Year's coverage on TV, including some of the fireworks in Boston. Then we finished Napoleon Dynamite, said good-bye to our friends, and went to bed...

...and woke up the same day! That doesn't happen very often. I watched most of Star Wars: Episodes I and II in celebration of the fact that Episode III comes out this year!!!, and then went to The Polar Express at the Comcast IMAX Theater in Jordan's Furniture. Contrary to what nearly every critic thought, it was really good.

That night I finished my work on the Special Edition of Starfighters of Adumar.

Jan. 2 (Sunday):

Today! Well, today (so far) I've had breakfast and written this. Later today I'll work a tiny bit on my web site, UPLOAD IT ALL (despite the fact that it's practically guarenteed I won't be totally finished), and -- this is the worst part -- do my homework. I think it should be illegal to give kids homework over vacation. Fortunately, I don't have much.

Well, that's all. Farewell!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Merry Christmas everyone! I love Christmas. If only it was longer... :-)

Due to all the Christmas excitement, I haven't been doing much work on my web site these past couple of days. Oh well... whether it's done or not, what I have of version 4.0 is going online at the end of this week, and version 3.2 is coming down.

Adios!

Winter Vacation!!!

Wahoo - winter vacation has officially begun!!! That means that, hopefully, I'll be working on my web site a lot. Finished or not, I'll upload what I have two weeks from now, at the end of vacation -- and the beginning of the new year! :-)

Titles & MSN Search Beta

First of all, I've decided to add titles to all of my posts in order to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Rejoice!

Second of all, I've started using MSN Search more and more now that they've released their great new beta. Try searching for "population of india," "prime minister of canada," "39 feet in meters," "define garrulous," "3x - 97.4 = 4 * 3x," "lifespan of an elephant," "height of K2," "John Williams," or a bunch of other cool things. Check it out!

Oh -- and happy December!!!

I'm now enjoying my last hour (or less) of vacation. Very sad... I won't even be able to wake up late tomorrow! Sad, sad, sad. Oh well. To honor the occassion, I'll now run through what I did this past week. Get ready for one of my longest posts ever!

Friday (Nov. 19)

My last class ended at 11:40, and then we went on a field trip to the mall until 2:10 (it's a very long story why we'd be doing that... but the good news is, while there I picked up two new Star Wars action figures!). After that, a few friends and I went to a new store near my house: "The Container Store." I had at first expected it to be fairly boring, but then I started hearing good things about it. Now that I've been there, I agree that it's great. :-) I got a stapler that, instead of staples, cuts a piece of the paper to be stapled and then folds it over itself in some weird way so that it acts as a fastener! It's great.

After that, we did... well... nothing, really, except kind of sitting around. Then we went to the school play, which was "On the Razzle" this year. It was pretty good, depite some pretty obvious (but very well handled!) errors. ;-)

Saturday (Nov. 20)

I went a couple different friends to go see the movie "National Treasure." It was pretty good, although the heroes acted pretty stupid at times. "Hey!" they say, "let's just pull out the Declaration of Independance in front of a trillion tourists and hope no one notices us discussing buried treasure!"

Sunday (Nov. 21)

We went out to Concord briefly to visit my grandparents, and then we left and went to the Celtics game! We won! Better yet, David Ortiz was there! He got ten times more applause than anyone on the Celtics, as is to be expected. :-)

Monday (Nov. 22) & Tuesday (Nov. 23)

I didn't really do anything but read and play Halo 2. That's not to say that I hadn't been reading and playing Halo 2 quite a bit those other days -- it's just that it's all I did on Monday & Tuesday. Well, except for a little computer stuff. Actually, a fair amount of computer stuff... but not as much as reading and playing.

On Tuesday, I played around with Adobe Atmosphere a little bit, which I had gotton as an early Christmas present two weeks ago today (the 28th -- so I got it the 14th). Previously I had opened it once or twice, but on Tuesday I actually managed to -- gasp -- create a small room with a red floor. (I still had the problem that every time the viewer opened the file they fell past the room into the empty void beyond, though.)

Wednesday (Nov. 24)

At this point it started to hit me that, tragically, vacation was halfway over! Unfortunately, that didn't at all spur me on to work more on my web site or anything, and to this moment I haven't worked on it one ounce, which is really a shame. Seriously -- I wish I had gotton more done. Sigh.

Anyway, on Wednesday I went to Finding Neverland starring Johnny Depp with a couple of the same friends with whom I went to the Container Store. It was a good movie, but very sad. (Although I argue that it has a "happy" ending -- at least sort off. It's that "the-world-is-dead-but-it-lives-on-in-your-heart" kind of ending.)

Thursday (Nov. 25)

I was greeted in the morning by my older brother, back for the weekend from San Diego!!! :-) Unfortunately, he had to head off to Rhode Island for the day almost immediately.

Later in the day -- around 1:00 -- we started the 1-hour trek (great for more reading) to my cousin's house for my family's annual Thanksgiving party. It was in a different house this year, which was interesting. My cousins have a GIANT golden retriever (Shamrock), a TINY little fluffy dog whose face looked like an Ewok (Logan), a cute little kitten who looked like one of Hasbro's "FurReal" animatronic toys (Spencer), and three other cats and a rabbit.

The kids spent almost the entire time in the basement, playing EA Sport's Madden 2005 for PS2 and ping pong.

Friday (Nov. 26)

We finally got some quality time with my brother -- YAY! There was plenty more Halo 2 to be had, as well as some computer time and reading -- how typical.

Saturday (Nov. 27)

My brother's friend came over, and my older brother, and another friend. We (but not my older brother) played with Nerf guns. Hehe... fun! Shooting! Guns! (Just kidding. ;-) ) That night, we played Red Sox Monopoly (but didn't finish our game) and watched some extras on the Harry Potter & the Prizoner of Azkaban and Star Wars Trilogy DVDs. There are some funny interviews on the HP disc, and the Star Wars DVD set has a great 2-hour documentary Empire of Dreams about the making of Star Wars that I just started watching earlier this week (maybe during that Monday-Tuesday lull -- I can't remember). The best part is the original screen tests -- they're hilariously bad, in some cases!

Sunday (Nov. 28)

How sad -- the last day of vacation. It also happens to be today. I woke up and immediately went on the computer, determined to get something done -- preferably web site related. Instead, though, I ended up making some read progress in Atmosphere. I was creating a simple maze when my older brother came over, and we started making a house together. Now it's a two-story mansion, although it still has no rooms -- only floors, walls, and stairs. Still, at least I've figured out how to texture the surfaces!

I'm hoping to put some of my Atmosphere stuff on my web site in time for version 4.0, which is now looking at a possible Summer 2005 release, although I'm still hoping and trying for a Christmas 2004 release, which with any luck will become a reality.

Later in the day, I (and my brother, Willy) did our family's Christmas card. Willy wrote the message and drew a couple little things, and then I scanned it, edited his handwriting in Photoshop to try to make it a little more readable, and put in some scanned photos. Next, sadly, I had to do my Spanish homework. We definitely shouldn't be given homework over vacations.

Finally, the same people who came over last night to play Monopoly came over tonight in an effort to finish the game, this time accompanied by their younger brother, who spent the time playing Midtown Madness 3 -- the first game to be in our Xbox other than Halo 2 since we got it on November 9th. In Monopoly, I landed on Free Parking and got about a thousand dollars, only to land on a spot with a rent of $1,150, go to jail, spend three turns trying to get doubles & fail each time, have to pay $50 to get out, and then get a Chance card that forced me to pay another $50. Yikes. Bad luck. By the time we stopped, everybody was in debt except one person: Mr. Diego Moneybags, who not only had that I-Owe-You worth over a thousand from me, but also other IOUs from the other people. Ironically, he has the fewest properties out of all of us: just four.

Even after today we didn't finish the game. Hopefully we'll have some other chance later.

Well, sadly it's almost time for me to get my last sleep of the vacation. Before then, though, I still I'll squeeze in just a couple minutes of web site editing. ;-)

According to the latest issue of Wired, Murphy's Laws have been proven to be statistically true.

I'm currently on my second-to-last day of Thanksgiving Break, enjoying a nice game of Halo 2. It is GREAT. :-) We've now created a clan, Tiny Green Men -- the name is based on the original-but-too-long name we first had in mind, Deep Space Leprechauns. Strange, I know... it's a VERY long story. If you play Halo 2 on Xbox LIVE, get an account over at Bungie.net for the best stat-tracking I've ever seen, and then check out the site we have over there for our clan and join!

Halo 2 sold 2.4 MILLION copies in the United States and Canada the day it came out (November 9th), which is equivalent to $125 million dollars for Bungie and Microsoft. That's more money on opening day than any movie in history!

I can certainly see why so many people bought it -- it's awesome! I've been playing a ton online, and soon my friend and I will be starting our very own clan. :-)

I have to go do homework now. :-( Bye-bye!

P.S. Yesterday was the first snow of the season -- yippee!! There was actually a couple inches outside today, which is a lot considering it's only November.

Guess what??? TODAY WE GOT HALO 2!!! It's awesome!!! Sadly, I haven't had too much time to play it due to homework, but I've played plenty to know that it rocks. :) Go buy it! Or, if you don't have an Xbox, go buy it and and Xbox! And buy Xbox LIVE, too, if you don't already have it! See you online!!!

Yesterday we went to the Red Sox Rolling Rally with some friends. It was great! It also wasn't as crowded in our little strip of the road than it was elsewhere, which was nice -- we were only the 4th or so row back.

THE RED SOX JUST WON THE WORLD SERIES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 86 YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm soooooo excited!

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, Willy's birthday came and went -- we celebrated on the 27th, even though his birthday is technically a day later. He got Fable, The Sims 2, and -- yippee! -- Battlefront. I'm obsessed with the later two, and he's obsessed with Fable, although (of course) we're all getting plenty of fun out of all three. :-)

While I hadn't really cared much about it before we got it, The Sims 2 is wonderful. You can have five-story houses!!! The character creation is exponentially better, so that now you can actually create a Sim that looks a lot like yourself!

More happy news: I'm currently enjoying a five-day weekend!!! We get Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off.

I'm off to play Battlefront now. Wish me luck in fending off the forces of the evil Empire!!! :-)