My Name Is

Its been just over a year since my last blog post, and I've been away from the site for a long time, figured I should reintroduce myself.

I'm Codemunkee, a 35 year old IT Director from the boogie-down Bronx stuck (I mean, living) in Central North Carolina. Been a gamer my entire life, and a developer/architect for over a third of that time. I spend a lot of time in RPGs on just about any platform (I have 4 different platforms at home, not counting my PC), and currently playing Mass Effect and Jade Empire.

I also play Halo 3 and COD4, along with Forza, but I suck at them. But I like the competition. As long as I'm competing in a field of equally crappy players!

So, where have I been? A lot has happened over the last year or so.

Mrs. Codemunkee got pregnant again, and this time it stuck. We're 7 months in now, due in early March. Its a boy! So with that has come getting the house in order. I've become a pro with a mitre saw and other power tools that I just used to suck at (hey, I'm a guy from NYC, what do I know about home improvement?). We've had a new everything dropped into our home, and its looking great. The baby's room just got done and I did a damn good job if I say so myself.

I'll be wrapping up business school in August; the entire year has been spent doing homework just about every day. On a nice long break now so its also a good time to catch up on the stuff I missed gaming (which is why I'm STILL playing Jade Empire), and of course working on the house and the yard. That's been a great learning experience as far as putting together my business plan goes. I honestly never thought there would be so much to it.

The biggest thing of all, I guess, within the context of gaming, is my official retirement from World of Warcraft. Account's gone, game discs gone (except my goodies from BC collectors edition), and the game is uninstalled. I thought it would be harder than it was to quit. But I'm happy and enjoying my consoles again, and the whole buyer's remorse thing with buying games and letting them just sit on the shelf while I ran instances really late during the work week has subsided a lot.

That's mostly it for now. Hope to reconnect with you guys again. Shoot me a FR anytime.

CM

12 Days of Christmas Comedy, Day 2

12 Days of Christmas Comedy, Day 1

And a Happy Chranukahzaa to you!

Couple of things to report.

Last week I beat Halo on Legendary for the third time. I do think it is better than Halo 2, although I'm going to confirm that by playing through Halo 2 again. I didnt make it past the second Hangar stage on Legendary; lets see if I'm any better (I doubt it).

I've been on a BC binge this past week, and its been all FPS and RPGs. My secret Santa got me Jade Empire (which is just... wow) and a gift card that I used to get Doom 3 Limited Ed (see previous comment on Jade Empire for my thoughts on this). Additionally, I've fired up KOTOR again because KOTOR II is sitting here, and has NEVER BEEN PLAYED! I said I would not play it until KOTOR was finished, and I need to get around to it, dammit.

After that its Fable. I have not finished Fable, although I imagine it wont take that long. And lets not forget Oblivion or Ninja Gaiden (which I am halfway through, proudly!)

And somewhere in between all that I'm trying to fit WoW in there. Is it possible? Will I ever sleep? Honestly, I dont know, but I think I'm at the stage where I have enough to do game-wise. I'm hoping to nab RS6 Vegas from Santa so P8ntball and I can play, and I still love Gears, but at this point it needs to get less play time since I beat it on Insane.

Ah, if only I were 16 again... it would be SO much easier to make my goals! But then again I think I am getting a better value for my buck. After all, I'm not plowing through everything trying to find the next best thing

Happy Small Software Vendor Day

Theres a good post over at Coding Horror where Jeff has declared today to be "Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor Day".

As far as gaming and small software goes, I support QuerySpree, but check out my earlier blog on free game development tools for a list of other excellent, high quality freeware/shareware software products.

If youre a developer and have never come across this blog, you should set your favorite RSS parser to it immediately. Like toot sweet!