Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the official release date of Microsoft’s long awaited sequal to Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, Age of Mythology. So, for lunch today Domincia and I went out to the mall and stopped by Electronics Boutique to see about picking up the new game. They had a large pile of them sitting on the floor so we gave it a try. The graphics in the new game are pretty amazing, especially the water scenes. It is done in the same style as Empire Earth but without the changing camera zooms like EE had. Overall, though, the game just doesn’t live up to its predecessor. AoE2 was just too good of a game and we all agree that they should have focused on bringing out a really good expansion pack to AoE2 rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. EE had already covered a lot of this ground and basically they have managed to make easy and hard versions of very similar games. Overall, I think I prefer to play EE over AoM even though AoM definitely has better graphics and sound (however, it is newer and EE has a new expansion pack out that I have not had a chance to see yet.) AoM is easier to play than AoE2 from a total game complexity stand point which is the opposite of what I had been hoping for. Instead of making the next big thing for hardcore AoE and AoE2 players, they simply managed to make a good beginners RTS. Definitely not what we were looking for. And all of the mythology stuff is just really silly and not impressive at all. At least to those of us who have tried it, the mythology just doesn’t work that well in game play. It is such a hard to understand and silly thing that it isn’t really all that much fun.

In addition to playing AoM today, I also downloaded the demo disk from Gentoo of Unreal Tournament 2003. The demo disk is really neat because it boots off of a CD just like a console (or older computer a la Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, etc.) so you don’t have to worry about whether or not your software is compatabile, just your hardware. Anyway, the game came right up and it looks totally amazing. This has to be the best 3D graphics that I have ever seen in a game. You could see individual blades of grass. This game is going to be really popular.

After playing a number of games this evening, Dominica and I sat down and watched Paint Your Wagon. What a great movie. My parents were huge fans of the musical and I grew up with the music from it always playing so the movie is very reminiscent for me. I have only seen the movie a couple of times but I know the music really well. Especially because I used a couple of the songs for audition pieces back in my college days.

Pretty busy day today. I started off working for Dell over at Cayuga Med Center first thing in the morning. The work was fine but like so many little tech jobs, something dumb wasn’t wrong and there wasn’t really anything for me to do. So, I stayed there for an hour and a half and headed from there down to Horseheads were Eric and I like to meet at the Original Italian Pizzeria which has some excellent New York Style pizza for cheap. We ended up running really early for our scheduled meeting so we spent a long time sitting at the restaurant. The meeting went well and the day seemed to move pretty quickly with all of the little things going on.

Happy Halloween everyone. Snow is starting to fall today. Winter is finally upon us.

Site maintenance today. September has been moved to the archives rounding off another quarter. Summer sure did fly by this year. And now we are already seeing some snow.

Very slow day today. Tomorrow is halloween so don’t forget to pick up some candy and to get all dressed up.

I finally got called back about that senate job that I was supposed to do over a month ago that got cancelled after I showed up at the job site. We are back on in two weeks (yup, it took Compaq two months to figure out how to do the job!

I am pretty tired today. I worked overnight for Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile in the States) from 8:30pm till 8:30am, came home, showered and changed into my suit, met Eric, headed to Cortland Memorial Hospital (who stood us up) returned home – all without getting to go to bed. I did get a chance to get some sleep while I was on the job last night but I am still pretty exhausted today. I am really looking forward to getting into bed tonight.

Loopy became the first one of us to be able to defeat the computer on hardest last night. Now the race is on to see who will do it next. Eric played against me again today and lost again. He doesn’t have a lot of experience playing against real people and that really affects him.

Vito’s, one of my favorite eateries in Ithaca, closed recently. Last night, Loopy, Min and I headed down there in the hopes of getting dinner but what we found was a new Thai and Loatian Restaurant. The new place looks nice but it will have a hard time competing with Vito’s reputation.

Ok, since I started writing the day’s updates, I played a game of AoE2 and have beaten the computer as well. Dominica has moved up from moderate to hard. She is taking the game a lot more seriously now. Min tried a newer game of the same genre as AoE2 called Stronghold. She has a demo of it that came with some other game that she owns. We tried playing it a little bit but the game just didn’t have the gripping power of AoE2. The people management gets too annoying and the gameplay suffers. Some of the graphics in Stronghold were really cool though.

Miranda is coming down this weekend to visit. I will probably only her for a day before I take off for Washington. Eric and I are heading down to DC on Monday and will be working there all this week.

I am thinking about attempting the Linux+ exam from CompTIA this Friday. I would really like to get that test out of the way and not have to worry about it anymore. I have already passed a couple of practice tests so I think that I am ready. I have read two books as well. If I manage to pass the Linux+, I don’t know what I will be looking to get certified on after that. There are so many certifications that it is really difficult to chose them appropriately. I also need to buckle down and finish up the last of the paperwork for my last semester at ESC.

Our Canadian Contingency should be happy when they notice all of the recent little Maple Leafs appearing all over the site. That is what happens when Miranda is coming to visit, Min and I just vacationed in Ottawa and Josh and I plan to go to Toronto soon.

Well, the financial situation is finally real… Loopy had to sell the awesome house movie projector. We are all very sad. We will have the projector for about one more week before it is finally packed up and shipped off. We will all really miss it. Hopefully we will be able to get another one really soon.

Today is a very busy day. I have to recover from having been away for two whole days and not having had the chance to check my email or to be in phone contact with anyone. Eric and I have two meeting already this week and that makes it even more hectic. On top of that, I am working a contract position this evening up in Syracuse for T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom out of Germany. I will be working there all through the night before meeting Eric and heading to our meeting in Cortland first thing in the morning.

Today I am taking care of little things and working to get all of the copies of my resume up to date everywhere. I found some copies that were a year and a half out of date which is an eternity in the IT business. There are so many sites on which to keep a copy of your resume – it is really daunting. I use around 30 sites in all. A few I use all of the time like Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, ComputerJobs, HotJobs and the first four of those account for 90% of all calls that I get. But you don’t want to miss a big opportunity just because you weren’t listed on the right site. So I take the time to keep resumes updated on all of them. One of the sites, BrassRing.com, that I was updating still had my address listed as Gaslight Village Apartments! I forgot that we ever lived there. That was the original Llama house here in Ithaca.

I did run into Mike Hritcko online today who used to work with Andy and I through CTG over at IBM a couple of years ago. He is no longer at IBM and is looking for work again like everyone else.