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Top 200 Photos: #167
Back once again to NYC for today’s Top 200 Photo. photo #167 is: Since I have family (in-laws) in NYC, I’ve tried, on occasion, to take my brothers to experience parts of NYC that we never got to see in the brief time my family rolled through before. On this trip, Dave got to ride…
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Egypt, Israel, and Palestine
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in…
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Gaming in January
This is just a mini blog post I’m going to try and remember to do monthly to keep track of the games I played to make it easier to tally up for the end of the year “Games of 2011” blog post. Assassin’s Creed II – 27 hours Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – 25 hrs blogged…
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Assassin’s Creed vs Assassin’s Creed II
Because I rarely play games when they first come out, I had the occasion to play Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II back-to-back. As I’ve mentioned before ( near the end of the post ) getting to experience sequels one after another can yield some benefits over waiting years in between. (Plus, in the case…
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Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World
It took a bit of convincing from Dan, but eventually I read the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. I knew right away that this was a book written for people like me. Just like Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, people older or younger than me would never get the full appreciation of all the references. I thoroughly hated the…
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2010 Game of the Year
I played a lot of games this year. Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school. Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year. I went to my raptr page and took a look at all…
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Using Boxee for the First Time
My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle,…
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Quitting the Nanowrimo
I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up. I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day. I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of…
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Thoughts on Death
Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle. It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass. It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”. So far in my life I’ve been to two…
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Civilized
I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5. He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it. I told him I was playing it and reminded him that…
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Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself…
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Another Look at KDE and Amarok Part 1
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE. It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE. Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there. But there’s this time I was able to look at it. Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.…
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Starcraft is Over-Rated
Starcraft 2 recently came out so, naturally, I just installed Starcraft for the first time. A few years ago, I decided to atone for that summer my brothers and I had played Warcraft III from an illicit copy by buying the Warcraft III Batlle Chest. It was a pretty awesome deal – for $20 I…
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Review: Inglourious Basterds
It’s been 65 years since World War II ended. We seem to be more obsessed with it than ever. There are two big reasons for this. First, WWII is the last war we unequivocally won and which had a clear, morally reprehensible enemy. Korea was a tie, Vietnam was a loss, and our only other…