d-musing

Been a while since I updated my LJ. This weekend we got pummeled with snow. Nearly 50cm (20 inches)! Add up all the snow we've been getting, the snow banks are, at some places, almost 7 ft high. There's gonna be some nasty flooding when this stuff melts.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Probably the best Christmas gift I've received this year is an email yesterday from tourist website schmap.com asking if they could include this picture in their January 2008 publication. Actually it's being placed on their shortlist for consideration so it might not even appear. But I thought it was a nice gesture.

Some thoughts about last night's Heroes finale.

( Read more... )

See ya next fall, Heroes.

Woot!  Finished Metroid Prime 3 Corruption.  Although I immensely enjoyed the point & shoot controls that the Wii brings, I think I liked the first Metroid Prime for Gamecube better.  The backtracking across planets was kind of annoying and the bosses in MP3 were much too easy, except for one.  The ending was also a little ho-hum.  (Geez, smile Samus, you saved the universe yet again!)

With this game and Zelda: Twilight Princess completed, I've finished the only two games I really looked forward to on the Wii.  I'm glad my friend was able to lend me the system so I didn't have to buy it.  You can tell how much he uses it given the fact that I could borrow it for several weeks.

This weekend has been very unlucky in terms of money. Saturday night I lost $60 at poker. Sunday I went shopping in the US and I got dinged on the way back to Canada for exceeding my limit by a measly 92 cents! Today I decided to sell all my shares of Nortel that I had purchased over the years through the stock plan. Lost about $4500. :(

Damn, this is an awesome live-action video for Halo3 done by The Discovery Channel. Makes me almost want to get an Xbox 360 just to play it.

LOLTHULU?

O R'LYEH?

YA R'LYEH

If you guys are interested, I've enabled the Wordpress blog on my domain www.dncroot.com. I'm going to use it to post technical stuff mostly related to my software development career.

I hope she didn't win!

Last year, in April, I bought shares of Gamestop at $37. I sold them just before their 4th Quarter earnings and made a tidy 30% return on investment, which is great by any measure. Since then, Gamestop shares have split 2-for-1 and have gone to a record high $46 (which is like saying they are worth $92 had it not split)!!!!

With last few weeks of market correction, I am not in the hole :(

My insanity has taken my FF12 characters to level 80. I don't think I can push onto level 99 without seriously wasting some precious time. What's even more insane is that I've already finished the game. So, I'm grinding for nothing, really!

With summer time, there's nothing to watch on TV. Or, rather, there's hardly anything to watch because I have some guilty pleasures such as Hell's Kitchen (who doesn't like to see Chef Ramsey yell and call people donkeys?), On the Lot (surprisingly good American-Idol style format on searching for the next Steven Spielberg) and I discovered a decent counter-terrorism drama on Showcase called The Grid (members of the CIA, FBI, NSC, MI5 and MI6 team up to thwart a terror cell's plot to ruin the Western economy).

So, the one show I have been following pretty regularly now is The 4400, which airs on USA. The show has on its 4th season now but I had to watch from the beginning to catch up. With Stargate SG-1 finished and no Stargate Atlantis or Battlestar Galactica episodes out until the fall, earliest, I needed something to fill the sci-fi void.

The show started off with a sort of X-Files feel, given that these 4400 people were abducted over a period of say 60 years and returned to Earth all at once. The comparisons are so perfect. Alien abductions, Tom/Diana as their version of Mulder/Scully. Even Tom's nephew who was abducted is parallel to Fox Mulder's sister, and Diana Skouris is supposed to be the level-headed scientist of the pair, like Scully. But soon it becomes more like Heroes or X-men (minus the costumes) as the 4400 develop powers and find themselves at odds with the US government.

( Thoughts )

Now I know what I want for my birthday this year.

The Futurama Returns movie on DVD, which is being released November 27, right on time :)

Done reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! Definitely the best of the series.

( Read more ... (vague spoilers) )

The importance of not making typos:

[15:20] James: do you know any good pimp that have gps
[15:20] Darryl@Work: haha why you looking to locate some hookers? hahah
[15:20] James: i mean pmp

(PMP = personal multimedia player)

I'm still waiting for my copy of Harry Potter 7 to arrive from Amazon.ca. Seeing how there are SOOOO many copies available and I only saved $1.50 (wow!) it seemed kind of silly to pre-order it. So, I've decided to download a leaked copy off the Internet and dig into that for now. I've already paid for a real copy, why shouldn't I enjoy it now that it's officially released?

(I'm a bit worried about the musical scene in chapter 3...)

Gamespy has an interesting article, 10 Theoretical Video-game Crossovers. I wonder how many have already been fanfic'd to death already.

10. Virtua Fighter vs. Tekken - I'm more of a Soul Calibur guy but knowing there's a plethora of characters in both gameworlds, the possibilities are endless!

9. Tomb Raider of Persia - The Prince meets Lara Croft? Maybe that would have made a better plot for the first movie (wasn't there some brief time-travel?)

8. X-Wing vs. Wing Commander - Possibly two of the greatest space shooters ever. Although everyone swears by X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, I've never played it and I'm more of a fan of the Freespace series. That being said, Freespace vs. Wing Commanders! TCS Ticonderoga against the Shivans!

7. MechWarrior vs. Armored Core - Meh.. sure..

6. Unreal Quake Tournament - I love UT but I never found it had much backstory. Perhaps the marines of Quake find the Strogg are secret backers of the galactic fighting league?

5. Half-Life: Halo - This has got to have been done already in the fanfic-realm. As the article states, Master Chief's got the brawn and Gordon Freeman's got the brains. The only thing better would be Metroid vs. Halo...

4. Devil of War - Kratos and Dante. That's the most interesting team-up in the list, personally. There'd be so much animosity and character interaction between the two, someone has probably already turned it into slash.

3. Mega Metroid - Rockman teams up with Samus. Uh, dot_chan?

2. Command & Conquer: Azeroth - The lamest entry in the list. Sure they play in both the same genre but how would you mash up these two together? Kane decides the GDI is too strong so he opens a dark portal to Azeroth and ally's with the Horde? Selling Tier2 Tiberium set, plsmsg kthxbye!

1. Metal Gear: Splinter Cell - I think it would be interesting to pit Sam Fisher against Solid Snake... I've never played Splinter Cell.

Joystiq posted a scathing first impressions of Soul Calibur Legends for the Wii. Their feedback based on the trial was blocky SC2-era graphics (a la gamecube), horrible control scheme, shallow enemy AI and overall terrible gameplay. Usually these "first impressions" articles point out the good things about a game and leave it up to the final review to surprise you with how bad it really was. This time they went straight for the jugular. Although I don't have a Wii anymore, it disappoints me to read about yet another bad (or mediocre at best) Wii-based game will likely be rushed out. More and more I'm looking at the PS3, even though I was very against buying one when it was first announced. Maybe after watching this video review of DiRT that I was really impressed.

Honestly the thing that scared me the most as a kid.