My girlfriend was at a craft fair this past weekend, selling some of her hand-made jewellery, just round the corner from her friends' house. Afterwards, we were invited over for dinner and a surprise impromptu birthday party for me!

Typically, my presents comprised of Game gift vouchers, which I spent yesterday on some PC games. FInally, I have my hands on Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I can see my WoW-time being rather curtailed for the next few weeks

I spent a few hours last night playing Mass Effect - 3 or 4 hours playtime, only about 1 hour actual combat, the rest exploration and dialogue - I nearly wet myself with excitement!

I think my guildies in WoW are going to be missing me

Current status: THE RECEIVER REQUESTED A HOLD FOR A FUTURE DELIVERY DATE. UPS WILL ATTEMTP DELIVERY ON DATE REQUESTED

I'm shipping my xbox in for repair and I got this message from xbox support.com.  I called 1800 my fucking box broke and all they could tell me was that I should call UPS.  I called ups and they told me they had to process an inquiry about why this happened.

Why the hell would the support center ask for another delivery date?  I have no fucking clue.

SOOOOOOOOOO........I'm waiting.  Luckily I've got a band-aid box.

have a good night.

Thanks to the thanksgiving holiday my box took a bit longer than I would have liked to get to the repair center in TX. Six days and it's been recived and the repair is in process. Hopefully I'll get lucky and get my box back sooner rather than latter so I can return my loaner.

Now that the Jasper's are out I'm seriously tempted to use this as the excuse to upgrade to a new elite and trade in the referb I'm likely to get from the repair center... Interesting point: an arcade + 120GB drive + HDMI cable kit is the same price as an Elite now. That seems fair to me. So do I want a new unit in white and peice meal it over a couple month or bite the bullet all at once... hrm...

Apparently there was something I missed on my drugs that said don't take with vitamins. That would make taking the combination I mentioned a "bad thing". Apparently I was "wrong" to do that. So when I asked for a med switch, well, they gave me a drug that has the same interaction warnings. Really great. So now I have two sets of drugs, that do the same thing, with the same problem interactions. Great. So I get to figure out how to change my pattern in life to fit this, which doesn't excite me much.

Of other note, I won a 2old2playHALO clan gamerscore challenge on 360voice.com. Since we mostly play Halo, or at least, most of the clan mostly plays Halo (I'm a bit of an odd duck), it wasn't a huge increase of points. I think 4 of the 8 people in the challenge didn't play anything but Halo, and we are all mostly maxed out on those achievements. I feel like I just typed "mostly" and "Halo" a ton.

SO!!! I bring you... Mulchinator's December Blog Challenge!!! I will lock this tomorrow night around this time, so it will run Wed-Sun. Anyone who reads this is welcome to join, but you will need a 360voice.com account! So if you have one, join before tomorrow night - if you don't have one, join the site and then join the challenge. I guarantee (almost) I will not win this one, so join today. This month is a practice round for bragging rights, next month you might have the opportunity to win one of my rejected Christmas presents!!!

...because I just played the 8-song "Rock Immortals" set on Rock Band 2 and the ACHIEVEMENT DID NOT UNLOCK!!! How frustrating!!

I guess most people are pretty happy with things the way they are now. Thanks jcotter and doorgunner for your input

I've never been much of a one to long for things to stay the same. On the other hand, I believe in the old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The old system with the larger pages worked just fine for me. I liked the way you could customize it and all. So far as I can tell only two things good have come out of this mess. Like jcotter said, the party features are a bonus. Leaving the group's game and venturing off to make changes somewhere else always meant losing contact with the group. No more. That and I like the idea of placing your more frequently played games directly onto the hard drive. Such a feature would have prevented wearing out the turntables on three of my old PS2s back in the day.

As for those avatars, well lets just say if I wanted a damned Wii I would have wasted the money on one. Maybe they will grow on me. I don't know. But I am already sick of looking at them. I just hope as time goes by they get more useful and not so useless.

Now to digress.

Christmas is coming far too quickly for my liking. Maybe a couple pics of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train will help me get into the Christmas spirit

Naw. Didn't work for me either.

Gamefly sent me some goodness - CoD: World at War. Just in time since I've been jonesing for something to kill. I just hope my sister bought Red Alert 3 for my b-day (next Monday).

In other actions, over the past week I've rebuilt my main PC into a quad-cored over-clocked minor-diety box. Got a Q6600 quad-core that runs stock at 2.4 ghz and pumped it up to 3.33 ghz (it'll do 3.5, but it then gets too hot). Four gigs memory (3.4 usable), a kick-ass 9800 gtx video card and created a hardware striped raid array for my boot and applications (games) drive. To top it off, I also bought a 24" panel. The rig & panel run like champs and should make me very happy over the next four years.

Anybody else noticing the slacking-off of whomever is supposed to be updating the 'currently playing' lists? A scroll through the list would find many games missing.

Well, I've got C&C 3: Tiberium Wars and UT2004 on the PC. Soon to be joined by SimCity 4 and maybe Red Alert 3. Too bad there isn't a PC blogging site like 360voice...

Was that it? I'm sure there is something else. Maybe next time...

I want Left 4 Dead and Mirror's Edge.

That is all.

And on Thanksgiving, a patient defacated on my table. 

Yah.

That really is all.

COULOW. out.

This is a northern view of Immigrant Mountain in Oregon. It is 7 or 8 pictures I put together with the new windows photo program. Cool pic huh?