No Motivation

I don't know, but yesterday I had a problem staying motivated. I did the podcast and it wasn't half as fun as the previous podcast's and it wasn't because of the co-host, or the content, I was just tired. Not really sure why, but I then joined a game of Gears of War 2 with nine other friends and didn't enjoy it at all. I usually eat that stuff up! I hope I get over this before the next time I hop onto XBL or do another podcast. On the other hand, I can't wait until the Cowboys play their next game.

Oops

I had a very long and well thought-out post today, but I forgot it. So you're stuck with this.

2-4-6-8...who do I appreciate?

My sweetie.

What's The Point

I really need to get away from my desk when I eat my lunch. Two reasons I need to do this. 1. I might actually be able to read a chapter in a book or an article in a magazine if I do this without getting interuppted by IM chat, e-mail or phone calls from co-wrokers. Today, it was IM chat. 2. If I go away from my desk, I might actually be able to finish my lunch on time. This doesn't happen often.

Why the Xbox 360 Avatar Hater-ation

I don’t understand why everyone hates Avatar’s on the Xbox 360? I have heard that a lot of people don’t like them. I just can’t understand why. I love my avatar, and I think Microsoft was genius in doing this, because now (and this does apply to 90% of the friends on my friends list) I can see a digital representation of who they are in real life. I also have a chance to show people what I look like. I just don’t get why people do not like the avatar features on the dashboard. I want to know what you think.

Reason Not to Hate Amercia's Team

I live in Richmond, Virginia, what many consider to be the home territory of the Washington Redskins, so I take a lot of flack for being a Dallas Cowboys fan. Why not? They are rivals. But I think it goes beyond that. Did you know that the Dallas Cowboys are the most liked team in the NFL? Did you also know that the Dallas Cowboys are the most hated team in the NFL? Well, this is why I not only love the Dallas Cowboys, but Tony Romo (the QB of America's Team) is starting to become my all-time favorite NFL player. Here is the link.

Geezer Radio 14

Episode 14 is ready for download!

SE-Mail = Fail

SE-Mail – scam electronic Mail not to be confused with snail mail.

I read on Fox News yesterday about a woman that lost $400,000 dollars to an e-mail scam. For those of you who want to read about it, here is the link. But as I thought about how stupid and ignorant this one woman is, I couldn’t help but think that she is not the only one that has fallen for this. If no one fell for this kind of scam, it wouldn’t be around to begin with. So, instead of bashing her for loosing her husbands entire retirement and falling for one of the most stupid scams out there, I will be focusing on who falls for this and why they fall for this.

First, who is targeted: Scammers (people who send out scam e-mails) target older people for several reasons. One reason is that sometimes older people don’t understand the technology that they are using. One instance of this is flash games. My wife instant messaged me to tell me she was playing a flash game (Squirrel shoot) that was e-mailed to her from her grandmother and I immediately told her that flash is one of the easiest ways to get a virus on your computer. Does her grandmother know this? Probably not, and one reason I know this is because I know her grandmother. This grandmother once got a text message from someone and in response took it back to the store and asked for a tech to fix it because she didn’t want text. You can’t fix that kind of thing, instead, you tell them to turn off the service.

Now, why people fall for these scams? A lot of people who fall for these scams at first think that the scam is actually a legit e-mail because they are looking for a get rich quick payout, and by the time they realize that it’s a scam it’s too late. Or in this ladies example, she had put so much money into the scam, she thought by putting more money into it, she could recoup the lost money (isn’t that the same philosophy as gaming addicts fall into), but it didn’t work out that way. What these people need to realize, though, is that get rich quick scheme’s don’t work and PLEASE remember the old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But these people don’t understand it at all. They see the dollar bills before the common sense.

How to stop se-mail! You can’t. Plain and simple, you cannot stop it because for every thousand of se-mail’s sent out, one person fails for it and that profit is 100% than they would have gotten if hadn’t have sent them out. You can educate people, but there will always be that one guy who falls for it and that one person will be the reason why the scammers continue to do it. There is another reason, why scammers still do it, because as we evolve our technique to stop the, they find a new way to scam people.

Let me get off my soap box and tell you something else that I find really annoying. I have Skype on my pc so that I can talk with Geezers around the country for Skypecast’s or roundtable discussions and it works really well. Last week, though, I got a message from someone saying “High, I’m new to skype and looking for friends. Please click on the link to view my profile.” I know this is a scam right away. How? I look at the address and see that it’s for a site that has nothing to do with Skype. But out of curiosity, I click on it and it takes me to a dating site that you have to pay for to get in. What this is, though was someone trying to get me to sign up and I would believe that they get a percentage of that money because they are “referring me” to that site. I immediately changed my setting from anyone can contact me to only friends, but will that limit my ability to add Geezers to my list of friends? I’m not sure, but we’ll see. Anyway, my point is that when a technology, whether it be text messages, IM, or VOIP phone service over the computer, there is someone out there that is going to try to make money off of a scam. When will it stop? NEVER.

Clean Up on Aisle 3

I love my wife for many, many reasons, but the one reason I fell in love with her so fast was her ability to make me laugh like a hyena at a marching band contest (not quite sure what that means, but she makes me laugh a lot). Anyway, not even having been married, I took her grocery shopping because at the time (and I think it still holds true) she loves going shopping with me. We had a lot of things on the list, and one of them was spaghetti noodles. Since she is a far better cook than I am, at least when she’s asking, I sent her to get the noodles, while I picked out soups and vegetables. I was one row over when I heard the tale tell laugh that I knew to be hers. She only does it when she is laughing at something funny and she’s embarrassed (but I didn’t know it at the time). So I walked to the end of my aisle and walked towards her aisle and there she was picking up spaghetti noodles off the floor, giggling and laughing uncontrollably. Blushing, I walked to her and said, “How...?” She couldn’t control her laughter enough to tell me, but I got the idea. Apparently, she grabbed a box of noodles that had already been opened and turned it so the opened section was facing down and it spilt all over the floor. I picked her up and said, “Grab a new box and let’s move on.” (I later told an employee that someone had spilt it and they cleaned it up.)

Fast forward to us being married for two years and a month. Friday night, the wife and I were watching a movie and wanted popcorn, and we were out, so we made an emergency dash to the grocery store. Decided that she needed to get more than just popcorn, we split up and I head for the popcorn. She didn’t tell me what she was going for, but I wasn’t worried. Five minutes later, while searching for the popcorn, I hear this giggling and laugh that I knew all to well. I walked to the end of my lane and then walk down a few more rows and what do I see? My wife standing over a pile of spilt spaghetti noodles on the floor with an open box in her hands. Blushing and chuckling, I walked to her and said, “Again...?” She couldn’t control her laughter enough to tell me, but I got the idea. Apparently, she grabbed a box of noodles, again, that had already been opened and turned it so the opened section was facing down and it spilt all over the floor. I picked her up and said, “Grab a new box and let’s move on.” (I later told an employee that someone had spilt it and they cleaned up aisle 3.)

I once heard a study that said laughing makes you live longer. As long as my wife is alive, I will live to be 130!

Bring The NXE On

Last night I got an e-mail saying that I had been approved for the New Xbox Experience. I can't wait until I go home and load it up for the first time!!! It's been a long time since I have been this excited about the release of new software...okay, that was last week with Gears 2, but you get my point...right?

R.I.P. Michael Crichton

I should have mentioned this last week, but things got a little hectic. My favorite all time author, Michael Crichton, passed away on Election Day last week and for the first time in a long time, I really felt like I lost something that I can never get back. Michael was more than just an author. He was responsible for the way that I looked at the world and how I understood the difference between morals and murals. I read “Jurassic Park” when at the age of15 in 1993. That book changed my life in a significant way. I taught me that there is a choice between doing it because I can, and doing it because I should or not doing because I shouldn’t. Do you know the difference? If you could time travel to the past or the future, would you do it just because you can? The next question you should ask yourself is: should you? Anyway...

It was books like Sphere, Congo, Prey and Timeline that held me in suspense and made my mind wander into placed that it had never been before. As soon as I finished “Jurassic Park”, I started wondering about things like Chaos Theory and moral implications on doing something groundbreaking. “Timeline”, perhaps one of his best all around novels, again asked the question about doing something because I can versus should I, but it also re-introduced a theme that a lot of Crichton books talk about: Greed. If you’ve read his books, 90% of them revolve or are started by a man or woman who don’t mean to let greed rule their actions, but that’s what ultimately happens. And that is perhaps the ultimate question of morality that I learned.

I don’t want to go on and on about morals and choices, but I do also have to say this. Another thing that Michael Crichton did to allow my mind to expand was to introduce new concepts to my mind and interest me to explore them. “Prey”, although not his best work, introduced me to the concepts of Grey Goo and the Uncanny Valley. I have also found that I have an extreme interest in nanotechnology, and how it will apply to future generations. (Although, he was a genius, he did make one prediction that was off and that was when he called video games “the hula hoops of the 80’s.” and “already there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading” in his 1983 book “Electronic Life”.

Michael Crichton will be missed by me in more ways than one.

Michael Crichton
Born: October 23, 1942
Died: November 4, 2008

Book List

This year, I have five books on my Amazon.com wish list and all but two are gaming related. Three Halo books and one Gears of War book some of which haven’t come out yet. Also, I just found out that one of my favorite authors put out two more books in this series. Ian Douglas put out two books in his Inheritance Trilogy before I even knew that they were out there. If you don’t follow Sci-Fi books, then this part wouldn’t pertain to you, but I do love them. I’ve read the Star Wars books (of course) but they are very predictable in the usual direction that they take. But the Ian Douglas books of the past are a rare exception to sci-fi. He’s penned three trilogies (The Heritage Trilogy, The Legacy Trilogy and now the Inheritance Trilogy). For the first book of all nine, “Semper Mars”, I can’t say anything bad about them...at all. He used realistic warfare tactics in space in the year 2038...or was it 2040? Anyway, there were no super weapons, there were no flying cars and there was no magic vehicle that took soldiers to space. It was all tech that we used today. “Lunar Marine”, the next book in that series, started off two years later and didn’t vary too far off his previous book, but for some reason wasn’t as good. “Europa Strike”, the last book in the Heritage Trilogy, was the first book that disappointed me.

When “Star Corp”, the first books in The Legacy Trilogy came along, it was around a hundred years later and it again blew me away, in a good way, with the tech that was used. He really opened my eyes to tech that could be applied in the future (even though Michael Crichton had been writing for years, his applications of the technology never went as far as “Star Corps”). “Battle Space” was another disappointment, but it did follow “Star Corps” which was a Triple A title in my opinion. “Star Marines” the last title in the trilogy, and it occurred 100 years after “Star Corps”, was rather good, but not nearly as good as “Star Corps”.

With the Inheritance Trilogy coming, I can’t wait to see where he’s taken the series.

When It Is THE Game

Do you remember when you used to play games for fun? I think I had more fun when it was for fun instead of competition. Well, Gears of War 2 brings that all back with its two game types of Co-Op and Horde. Co-Op is played with two players on any of the different difficulty levels and is fun...as long as the story lasts, where Horde is where the FUN is at as long as you can hold a controller. Not only is it co-op with four friends, it’s fast paced, confusing and difficult as all get out. Even on “Casual” difficulty, the 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th levels are incredibly hard! I played from 6 pm to around 11 pm and only managed to get to level 48 (there was an hour and a half that we played Submission [Meatshield], though). Now, I can imagine that after a while this game can get played out as other newer games come out, but I can’t believe how much fun I have had in such a short time. I won’t bore you with a review for two reasons; a) anyone who reads this blog either has the game or doesn’t care for it. b) I can’t be unbiased because I am a total Gear Head!

As for the past four days, I have been SUPER busy at work and at home. If you want to know how the midnight sale went, please listen to the latest episode of Geezer Radio (and while you are at it, laugh at Furgus [snicker....]). Friday consisted of playing games until 6 am, sleeping, playing from 1 pm until 5 pm and then watching movies all night with the wife. Saturday was tiring as me, the wife and four others toured our nation’s capital. We went to the Holocaust Museum, which was really enlightening and somber. Sunday was just a rest-up day, but I ignored my bodies request for rest and played Gears of War 2 and finally beat the campaign. What an awesome game...(I think I already mentioned that). Yesterday consisted of being way to busy at work for me to post a blog entry and get the latest episode of Geezer Radio out, so I chose Geezer Radio. Then all night long (as I mentioned above) I played Horde on Gears 2...and it was fun!

This Town is a Chainsaw Town

As someone who is quasi-patient, 12:01 am on Friday is going to be a day that HAS FINALLY ARRIVED. I thought that 11/5 would be the day I was looking forward too the most, because it signaled the end of a 2 year election cycle that drove me bonkers. November 5th also signaled the end of a VERY annoying month long add blitz in the state of a Virginia which also happened to be a swing state. Well, at 12:01 am tomorrow, another highly anticipated day will arrive. What day is that? What could be so important that I couldn’t wait until tomorrow? GEARS OF WAR 2 is released to the general public. Me, for one, am not going to let one minute more than I can help pass without owning that game. Why is this so important? The original Gears of War was the most played game of my life. It wasn’t just the single player that I played a lot, but it was the multiplayer (mp) that I fell in love with. You can point to the wonderful mp game play, but in fact it was the very first game I played with Geezer Gamers. I remember the first time I hopped into a mp game with SparkStalker and McJeepers. I sucked and I sucked bad, but I had fun. Two to three days later I was signed up at GeezerGamers and introduced to fun and enjoyable multiplayer action. It was also when I was introduced into GGSE (Geezer Gamers South East – the Clan). So, in a way, Gears of War 2 is a reminder of how wonderful it is to be a Geezer...that and I can now Chainsaw people at will!

Not So Surprising

I wish I could say that the landslide victory was a complete surprise, but I wasn't surprised at all. McCain didn’t do a good job at all with his campaign. Oh, well. I’m not considered wealthy by Obama’s standards and I really don’t think that he’s going do that to the wealthy, because, now he has to worry about getting re-elected. Did you hear about the march through Richmond, VA that occurred last night? Check this out: Link. It’s good to see the younger voters out en-mass celebrating and not rioting. Maybe, just maybe, PEBO (President Elect Barack Obama) can make a difference for the good. And change is most of the time a good thing. At least, that’s my hope.

Me and the wife, yesterday, both got up an hour early and went to the polls together. We got there at 5:55 am, and had to wait until 6 am for the polls to open, and even then we had to wait 30 minutes in line. I was very proud of her for doing that with me.

E-Day

Election day is upon us. Did you vote?

Also, SkypeCast will be held tomorrow night at 9 pm EST. Hope to hear you there!

One More Day Until...

Sanity is restored to the nation. That is right. One more day until the election is over and hopefully, we will not have any recounts to watch over for the next two months. No matter who wins, PLEASE let it be over by tomorrow night.

Oh, the movie Zack and Miri Makes a Porno is effing hilarious! Kevin Smith and company along with Seth Rogen, Justin Long, Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) and of course Elizabeth Banks do a great job at what they do. Seth, Justin and Brandon though had one of the funniest scene's in the whole movie. I won't spoil it for everyone, but it's not something I am used to seeing from Justin and Brandon and they do it WELL. Seth plays the same character as he did in 40 Year Old Virgin but it worked well. I have to give some applause, also, to Jason Mewes and Jeff Anderson (both in almost every Kevin Smith movie ever made) for their parts. They are always great. And my last shout out to actors is to Craig Robinson for his portrayal of Delaney. That was FUNNY. One last thing about the movie, the soundtrack was the best that I had ever heard in a movie. Maybe, though, it was because I grew up with those songs and I could see myself living in Zack's world (but not as Zack). If you loved Superbad or 40 Year Old Virgin, you'll like Zack & Miri.