11:50 AM
A friend of a friend has some serious cancer going on, so a foundation was created in her name to help raise awareness/money for the cause. Last night we went to a fundraiser at The Grove in Anaheim. There was a nice dinner, casino tables, silent auction, raffle, and musical entertainment.
The Voodudes opened up for The Big Ball Stars, an all-star band with guys from AC/DC, Motley Crue, GNR, and others.
Afterward in the VIP lounge I tested my caffeine tolerance and sobered up by downing five or six cups of coffee. Maybe seven. No, eight. I'm not really sure. I had some eclairs and pastries, too. I am a fat cow.
Anyway, despite the coffee I didn't have any trouble falling asleep at 1:30 this morning. I'm gonna have to say that my magical resistance to caffeine-induced alertness continues unabated.
2:28 PM
Ooooh yeah. I don't think I ever mentioned it here, but I gave in to peer pressure and got a Nintendo DS Lite a little while ago.
The last thing I needed was another gaming system, so I was fully expecting to get a gut full of buyer's remorse. Luckily that never happened! It may not be as powerful as the PSP, but the DS has great games galore and it's totally fun.
I've been playing Mario Kart, Tetris, Wario Ware, Castlevania, Brain Age, New Super Mario Bros, Metroid Pinball, Meteos, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney...the list of A+ titles goes on!
I think the key is to wait for a game system to establish itself with a big library of games instead of early-adopting. In the case of the DS it's been two years since that thing hit stores, and now there's more great games out there than I know what to do with.
The GBA SP still wins for being the most portable system ever made, but the DS Lite is a close second!
2:00 PM
Have you seen Driving Force yet? You might want to check it out.
John Force is a drag racer, and he is totally crazy. Gary Busey style crazy. He even looks like him.
It turns out his worldwide racing HQ is only five minutes from my house. He must live near me because whenever they show him driving around town I say things like "HEY! That's MY grocery store!" and "I just went to that Best Buy yesterday!"
So if you want to check out my neighborhood without stopping by, just watch the show about the crazy drag racer!
8:31 PM
Corporate marketing departments just loooove to use Flash. Just check out any movie website. Flash up the butt.
Usually it's annoying as hell. But the official New Super Mario Bros site at http://mario.nintendo.com/ makes me happy. It looks pretty slick and it's fun to click things. That almost never happens in the world of Flash. And yes, the game is totally awesome.
It is still hot dudes I am super cereal One-hundred-plus temps
To help escape the heat we went to my parents' and spent Saturday night there. That night we saw some strange-ass apocalypse-type weather. I'm not even joking man. It was fuh-reaky.
As the sun went down we started to see lightning off in the distance over the ocean. Maybe one bolt every five minutes or so. Distant thunder. As it got darker the wind started to really pick up and blow stuff all over the place. Temperature at 9pm was about 89 degrees.
All of a sudden the wind dies. Just completely disappears. It drops ten degrees in about five minutes.
Then we see the biggest lightning bolts ever. They shoot down and land into the ocean, vaporizing a column of water as they make contact. So much lightning! Maybe 20 strikes each minute. As each bolt hits we can see the surface of the water for miles in all directions for a half-second. Thunder claps are long and loud. Sirens in the distance.
We get sprinkled by passing clouds, but it hasn't started raining. The wind comes back. Fog appears out of nowhere and blows to overtake us so quickly that it looks like smoke as it flows and wisps through the air. The moist heat returns.
Through the fog I see an orange glow in the distance. As the fog clears the glow sharpens and reveals itself to be a huge brushfire, started by lightning, over on Catalina. I'm relieved that an ocean of water separates us from the flames.
The storm comes closer to us and the sprinkles increase in number and size. The lightning comes closer too. We head back inside just in time to avoid a torrential downpour.
The rain came and went through the night and continued through the late morning Sunday.
This kind of weather isn't uncommon for the rest of the country. But in Southern California it's pretty rare - and exciting when it happens!
11:40 AM
Last night I saw something so horrible and traumatizing that it scarred me for life. I saw it, my wife saw it, and our Swedish houseguests saw it.
Unfortunately I can't post what 'it' is because I'm afraid the traumatizer may someday read this only to discover that we saw them doing something when they thought nobody was looking.
It's pretty hot, dudes. This weekend it hit 106 at my house. Insane. We've had the AC on pretty much non-stop these last couple days. My electricity bill will be terrifying.
You can see the barometer's been dropping too. They say we might even get a thunderstorm here or there.
9:28 AM
We had a company outing over the weekend. We all went go-kart racing at this neato indoor racetrack called Dromo One.
We rented the whole place out, but of the 23 people who said they were coming, only 8 people showed up. More than half of my co-workers completely flaked and didn't even call to say they weren't coming. Considering how much we spent to rent this place out, that made me a little mad!
Anyway this place was totally sweet. They give you a quick safety lecture, then you get suited up with a head sock, jumpsuit, helmet, gloves, and neck brace.
Because of the mass flaking we barely had enough people to do the whole races/semifinal/finals thing. Soooo after the bulk of the racing was done, we wound up doing this crazy 20 lap endurance race.
Driving a go-kart is tough work. To do a hard turn you only need to turn the wheel about 1/4 around, but you really have to pull on it hard, and you get thrown around a lot. If you bump someone or get bumped, you get bruises! I found myself running out of breath as I held on for dear life in some of those turns.
In the end I was a lousy racer, coming in last or second-to-last on most races. But it was still fun! Afterwards when I was driving home I had to teach myself how to drive a car again. Turning the steering wheel all the way around to make a turn felt super weird, and I totally wanted to skid out in all of my turns. I didn't, though.
1:58 PM
If you haven't upgraded your PSP's firmware beyond 1.50, your patience has just been rewarded!
DevHook 0.44 was just released - it now lets you emulate *every* firmware version (including the latest, 2.71) on your 1.5 PSP. You're actually using 1.5 to 'run' 2.71 as if it were a standalone app. It sounds crazy, but it works flawlessly.
Now there's literally *nothing* that can't be run on a PSP with firmware 1.50. Homebrew emulators, UMDs, ISOs of UMDs, you name it.
They're the first manufacturer to produce a 50" plasma TV that can display a 1080p signal natively. The PRO-FHD1 retails for $10,000 though - exactly TWICE the cost of their 50 inch 1080i plasma. Ouch!
Come on, Panasonic. It's your turn to answer the call of 1080p. Everybody's expecting great things from you in 2007. 1366x768 is SO totally 2003. You can do eeet!
Epic Games VP Mark Rein called episodic gaming a "broken business," triggering outrage among some delegates during the Develop Conference in Brighton, England today. (more)
9:22 AM
You know you've hit rock bottom at the Orange County Fair when you're stuffed beyond belief and are staring down the bottom of a cup of Dippin' Dots thinking "I know can finish this if I just buckle down and focus."
9:16 AM
Late last night we went to a special ticketed event for POTC: Dead Man's Chest. Things started in the Disneyland Hotel with the usual merchandise pickup stations and photo op, then we were given a pretty enormous elaborately-themed feast with appropriate entertainment, followed by a two-hour unlimited fast pass for the ride and a midnight showing of the movie.
Going to see a movie at midnight might sound like a great idea, but it really isn't. The movie itself was great, even though it had a Empire-Strikes-Back ending, but we didn't get home until 3 in the morning. I'm running on about three hours of sleep right now and I'm starting to see colors that aren't there and everything I've had to eat or drink today has tasted like a new flavor of water.
I'm not the spry young devil I once was. I'm getting too old for this staying out late business.
Saturday we drove down to San Diego and checked in to the W Hotel in downtown San Diego. We stayed in probably the coolest hotel room I've ever been in. I always knew W hotels were hip and modern, but I'd never actually stayed in one before. Totally sweet.
One of Tammy's Swedish coworkers and her boyfriend were in town so we met for drinks, then dinner, and then drinks, and then drinks, and then drinks again.
I do remember the four of us stopping at Mister Tiki to share a monster-sized Mondo Martiki. I think that was around 1, but it's all sort of a blur.
We wandered around the Gaslamp Quarter from bar to bar until 2:30 in the morning. That was a little unexpected, and probably unwise because we had planned to go to Sea World early the next day.
We made it to Sea World around lunchtime. We saw the shows, rode Atlantis, and did all that stuff on Sunday.
Monday we went to the Wild Animal Park. We went on a photo safari tour which took us on the back of a covered truck through the backstage areas where we fed giraffes...
And a rhino!
The Wild Animal Park is really a hidden gem. Most San Diego tourists will probably opt for the Zoo or Sea World, but the Wild Animal Park is really a lot of fun. It's basically in the middle of nowhere and even though there's so much to see it's super-huge so it never really feels crowded.
We drove home Monday night to avoid holiday traffic on the freeways. Last night we wound up in Disneyland to watch fourth of July fireworks.
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