Absolutely Ludicrous

So quite a while back, I decided that I would stop with the ranting and whining that seems to make up the content of many a blog. There’s too much negativity in the world already. I don’t need to add to it. Do things bother me? Some things do, but it’s usually not worth complaining about. Nobody wants to hear it anyway.

But today… I can’t believe what I’m seeing. So take this as a consumer tip. If you are looking for the new 5-disc Blade Runner DVD set that has an MSRP of $78, do not buy it at Best Buy. Best Buy would like you to pay them $100 for it. This is the same set that can be had at Amazon, Deep Discount DVD, and just about any other place for $55.

LaserQuest Champion

The LaserQuest birthday party was today. It was awesome! It was even cooler than I expected it would be because the group of players included unknowns (teenagers off the street) to add to the challenge as well as two of my adult friends who stayed and played. So the kids were gunning for each other, three dads and a bunch of teenagers.

So do I still got it? You bet I do. In the first match, I came in second place out of 25 players. The top spot went to one of the teenagers who told me he plays regularly. My son, the birthday boy, came in third to last place… just above his 5-year-old sister. I asked him what his strategy was and he told me that he was the team leader of a bunch of friends… he was kind of in the middle of the pack and not shooting much.

The second match included the teenager who came in first place and several more “extra” players for a total of 34 players. On this match, I came in first place! My son, who broke away from the pack, did much better this time coming in 13th place with a shot-to-hit ratio of 9% (as point of comparison, mine was 11%). He would’ve scored much higher, but he had to hit the restroom in the middle of the match. D’oh! So while I got 914 shots fired, he only shot 536 times that match.

All in all, it was a blast for him, his friends, me and my friends. The place was huge… almost as big as Photon was (in Huntington Beach, CA) back in the day. This had two levels, vertically, with several ramps up and down. Lots of slots, mirrors and grates in the floors of the upper level.

What’s Wrong with this Picture? (or Does My Son Really Have Better Taste Than Me?)

So I had some music on this morning while checking email. I paused the music to answer the phone and I could hear that my 7-year-old son was listening to music pretty loud up in his room. He was listening to “The Seeker” by The Who. What was I listening to at the same time in my office? The Crazy Frog version of Axel F.

The Bible according to Google Earth

This is cool. An art project that takes four key scenes from the Bible and imagines them as if we were looking at them using satellite photos (or Google Earth). Pretty amazing. Check it out here.

‘Tis the season

Here we are in the Christmas season. The decorations are up. The music is playing on the stereo. Snow is falling. There’s a fire in the fireplace. And mom is cooking up yummy treats. Perfect.

Warmest wishes to you.

Time for a riddle

So the other night at dinner the two oldest kids started asking each riddles that they’d learned at school. So I tried one to see whether or not they’d heard it before. It was the ol’ classic “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?” The answer, of course, is “a newspaper”. As it turns out, they had not ever heard that one before. But the funny thing is that when I first asked the question, my 5-year-old daughter instantly… I mean without even taking a minute to think about it… blurted out “Clifford in a zebra costume!”

I laughed so hard, I almost choked to death. Good times.

Now we’re gettin’ to the good stuff

This year my son is having his birthday party at a place called Laser Quest. I can’t wait.

Best Costume Ever?

So this teenager came to the door dressed as the dying helmet-less Anakin/Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi using his Darth Vader helmet as his candy bucket. Awesome!

Happy Halloween

I’m just a big kid

My wife sometimes laughs at me and calls me her fifth kid (after counting our three actual human children and the dog). It’s true really. Last night being a good example. Everybody was in bed and it was close to midnight. I was done checking in on the finances and listing a few old things on Half.com for sale. I should’ve gone to bed, I s’pose.

Instead, I fired up Halo 3 and a little bit later, my friend Joe joined (a little earlier for him as he’s an hour behind me). So we tried some multiplayer… but not just any. We started up a map and then used the new Forge system. This allows us to switch from being a player to being a floating ball that can edit the map at will. Imagine running around shooting at each other like normal, but then switching into edit mode and picking up the spawn point for the rocket launcher and hiding it somewhere. Then we found we could buy more items to put in the map… so after Joe hid a cool melee weapon, I just bought one of my own and put it in my weapon room (just some room I picked out to put my stuff). I thought my weapon room was pretty cool until Joe bought and installed some teleport portals that allowed him to just show up in my weapon room from his side of the map where he was hiding the megashield and invisibility power-ups. Hah!

After a while of that, we found that we could buy some quadrunners (called a “Mongoose”) and drive them over some gravity lifters to go flying through the air. That got a lot more fun when we decided to see what kinds of things that we could buy for the map that explode. So we started piling up a bunch of explosive crates and propane tanks. Then we’d drop a trip mine in the pile and “fly” the Mongoose into the whole mess. Big crazy explosions with flying pieces of Mongoose and shrapnel everywhere. Hilarious fun!

Finally at 3:30 my time I went to bed. That part was probably not the smartest thing in the world, but, boy, I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.