I purchased Worms on the Xbox Live Arcade the other week, and have gotten a great deal of enjoyment out of it.  So far the roommate and I are about even for wins/losses, but I think my skills aren’t as good as they used to be.  The first time I ever played a worms game was back in the Win95 days so you’d think I’d be a god at it, but it’s been awhile and I’m rusty :).  Christine seems to do better against me, though I’ll always blame the map haha.

I’m humming right along in GTA 4, but also taking my time to enjoy the game fully.  The missions are always very engaging and the storyline is simply awesome.  I do have a gripe with the shooting system though, the camera can make you disoriented if you have multiple enemies around you and have to keep moving the camera as you dispatch them.  I’ve only tried the “friends” multiplayer option so far, but I think I will delve into the full multiplayer tonight and post thoughts about that.

I’ll have some pictures up of the new garden soon, so you can all see the disaster recovery job my girlfriend and I did on it.  She’s the green thumb and did the majority of the work.

I recently purchased a set of JBL On Tour Portable speakers for my Ipod on amazon, and I tell ya.. for 30 40 (oh well eh!) bucks it doesn’t get better. The sound coming out of them is freakin amazing for how small it is. Definitely have some party sound for the house now.

My tonsil recovery is pretty close to complete. I will probably still have a little soreness for a few weeks, but otherwise I feel great and can eat almost anything. I may even try a mixed drink or two this weekend. We’ll see how that goes. As unfortunate as my two trips to the hospital were for rare bleeding, I am happy I had the procedure done.

Along with the speakers, I ordered the book that goes with the game Mass Effect, which I recently finished for the Xbox 360. Outstanding game minus the technical issues. The book is called Mass Effect: Revelations and is written by Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer for the game. I’ve heard a lot about this book and will be starting it soon. Expect a short review of it in the next few weeks.

Tonight will be RC2 of Hak5 Live, and should hopefully be much better than RC1.

I will be discussing the Nokia N770 Internet Tablet and my roommate will be talking about his fix for the Xbox 360 3 rings of death problem.

Tune in at the website here which is going to be powered by Ustream.tv and Stickam. IRC is irc.hak5.org in channel #hak5.

I made my appearance on hak5live last night and all I can say is that it was quite an interesting night. I was a little tense with the cameras at first but I think I managed to pretend they weren’t there after a couple of minutes.

My show and tell involved Homebrew roms obtained from http://www.pineight.com/gba/ and http://www.pdroms.de/ from within an Ubuntu 7.04 environment using an Xbox 360 controller and the VisualBoy Advance emulator. I used the VBAExpress frontend for it to save on the command-line usage.

I think we all learned quite a lot about how different production is for a live show versus a show that undergoes editing before being released. The first 35 to 40 minutes after the 30 minute delay in starting went pretty well I thought. The next time they do this it should be much more streamlined.

The show should be edited and available for download sometime in the next couple of days. Visit http://www.hak5.org and http://www.hak5live.org for more details.

I might as well make the vow from here on out that barring any disasters, there will be at least one post per week here.

With that said, here are some of the things i’ve been up to in the last 6 days:

Movies: Finally got around to watching Pirates of Silicon Valley. I thought it was pretty interesting, and certainly portrays, at least from my perspective, a decently accurate story.

Music: Jack Johnson, Mark.Nine, starboard morning, Mike Masquith (the last three were free on amiestreet.com)

Games: MLB2k(Xbox360) is about the worst baseball game i’ve ever played. Of course I don’t traditionally play them, so perhaps it’s just me. I’m getting better at NCAA07(Xbox360), I do like the pacing a little better than Madden. Nothing much beyond those.

Podcasts: PaulDotCom, net@nite, CyberSpeak, and Hak5. All very very informative.

Career: The first CISSP study group that the local ISSA chapter is doing is so far very outstanding. I feel a lot better about my chances at passing the exam.

It looks like I will be attending Shmoocon 2007 with a coworker.  It should be very interesting.

My acoustic guitar from music123.com arrived today, and i’m going to play around with it for a while.

Thanks for reading!