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Answered Wish

In: Books|Thoughts

24 Mar 2011

Two days ago I posted about how much I want need to read the fourth and final book of the Inheritance cycle.

Yesterday (a day later, mind you!) this wonderful announcement was made:
http://bit.ly/hrbETL

I think Christopher Paolini reads my blog.

If that’s the case, then Mr. Paolini, I have cancer and I plan on before November 8th.

(1) Comment
Tags: Eragon, Inheritance cycle

Excuses

In: Books|Gaming|General|Work

22 Mar 2011

It’s been too long. I’m not making good on my reading/writing goals. Here’s to changing that.

In my defense, my free time on the weekends has been devoured by my recent employment at the local laser tag arena (CyberTag). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m quite grateful. Recently, my girlfriend and I have been clawing our way out of the ever-deepening grave that is called debt. And we’ve been doing so at a very rapid rate, might I add, much due to the extra bacon our weekend jobs bring in. Plus CyberTag isn’t what I would call hard work, good people own it, and good people work there. We usually have a grand ol’ time. Both of my jobs are pretty great. But I don’t think it matters where you’re employed, working seven days a week gets old. It’s a sacrifice that needs to be made, though, to meet our financial goals.

When I have time to catch my breath, I have been playing Team Fortress 2 here and there. I have been thoroughly enjoying it, mainly because I do not have to devote my life to the game to have fun. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I am a casual gamer. I cannot trudge through any MMO long enough to reach the level cap. Therefore I never really get to the meat-and-potatoes of the games, the endgame content. With first person shooters you get thrown into the same action no matter if you’re a veteran or a newbie. There is a really steep learning curve with TF2, which I chalk up to no matchmaking. But once you get past that, it’s a very fun game that you can play an hour or two at a time.

I haven’t picked up a book since my girlfriend and I finished The Hunger Games Trilogy (which we highly recommend to anyone). Right now the contenders are The Millennium series or The Dark Tower series. What I really want to read is the fourth book in the Inheritance cycle but the book’s lack of existence is bit of a hindrance to that goal. I feel like I have been waiting for The Inheritance cycle to conclude for an eternity. I hate waiting to see what happens next. This goes for any kind of media really; television series, movies, books, etc. For example, instead of watching a TV series from week to week, I wait until the finale is over and watch the season it its entirety. Usually I am pretty lucky in the aspect of starting a book series late in its lifespan. I picked up Harry Potter right before the sixth book came out and the Hunger Games after it was already concluded. But I began the Inheritance cycle when Eragon was the only book released. Since then I have read Eragon four times, Eldest three, and Brisingr twice. Not sure if I believed that reading them so much would give me some kind of closure, because it didn’t! It actually turned my need for closure into burning desire. Depending on how the series is concluded, the Inheritance cycle could become my favorite books, knocking Lord of the Rings to second place. I know this statement has the potential to anger a lot of Tolkein-heads, but I have my reasons and they are my own.

Would you think less of me if I told Christopher Paolini that I had cancer and my last wish was to read the fourth book of the Inheritance cycle? Someone tried that with Stephen King and The Dark Tower series, and he didn’t budge. And I don’t think the person was lying! That’s dedication Mr. King.

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Tags: CyberTag, Eragon, Inheritance cycle, Team Fortress 2, tf2, work

Operation Geekend

In: Geekend|Technology

30 Jan 2011

Operation Geekend (geek + weekend, thanks Trevor) was a success.

The primary goal of the geekend was to get XBMC running on my newly arrived Apple TV. This process ended up being much more difficult for me than I expected. This wasn’t caused by any particular error, but due to a random string of coincidental errors and problems.

First of all, in order to jailbreak the Apple TV you have to connect the device to a computer every time it needs to boot. This is called a ‘tethered jailbreak’ and is required because an untethered jailbreak doesn’t yet exist for the latest version of iOS devices. This isn’t as big of an inconvenience as you might think, because the Apple TV ‘sleeps’ most of the time instead of powering off. You’ll only need to connect it to a computer to boot if the Apple TV loses power. But still, I am looking forward to an untethered jailbreak for current versions of iOS devices for convenience’s sake.

Perhaps the biggest problem I came across during my geekend was the software required to jailbreak the ATV could only run on Snow Leopard or above. Dissapointingly, the MacBook I have access to was running Leopard. No biggie, right? I ‘obtained’ a copy of Snow Leopard, and there were three ways of going about installing it: via dual-layer DVD, flash drive, or external hard drive. This presented a problem because I don’t have access to a dual-layer DVD burner, the biggest flash drive I own is 8GB which ended up being a hair too small, and my only external hard drive is a 2 terabyte full-to-the-brim network hard drive.

A USB powered external hard drive has been on my to-buy list since I modded my Wii to play backup games. I just needed somewhere to store those backups. So that helped make my decision to purchase an external hard drive. I could use it to load up Snow Leopard on the MacBook, then format it and finish setting up my Wii to play backup copies of games. This became the secondary goal of Operation Geekend.

Now if I was on the commercial where you see people stating whether they are a Mac or a PC, I would definitely claim to be a PC. I haven’t had much experience in the world of Apple and Macs. This being said, it took me a tiny bit to figure out how to format my newly purchased external hard drive so it would act as the Snow Leopard boot disk. Eventually I succeeded and was running Snow Leopard on my MacBook. I then moved on to loading up that inconvenient Snow Leopard-only software and attempted to jailbreak my Apple TV. I kept running into a pesky phantom error that apparently stumped the entire internet as a collective whole. I eventually stumbled across some Windows-only software that claimed to fix my problem. How convenient is that? Windows-only software that attempted to fix the error I received while using OSX only software to jailbreak the ATV. Needless to say, this didn’t work.

It all came down to updates. Once I was running the most up-to-date version of iTunes, everything was peachy. If I would’ve done this in the first place, I would’ve saved myself tons of time. In fact, if the MacBook was already running Snow Leopard with the latest version of iTunes, it would’ve saved me about five hours. Moral of the story: update your crap.

I finally had XBMC running at about 2:30am last night/this morning. I wanted to enjoy the fruit of my labor and attempted to watch Scrubs but found myself quickly sawing logs before the episode was over. The fruit-of-labor-enjoyment didn’t actually begin until today.

After my weekly beard grooming, lunch, and some frisbee time with Pixel I moved onto the secondary goal of the geekend, finish modding my Wii to play backups. Luckily this went with only a small, easily fixed hitch and I had my Wii playing backups within an hour.

Needless to say, after Operation: Geekend, there should be no lack of entertainment around here.

Here are the tutorials I followed, if you’re interested:
Installing the Homebrew Channel on the Wii
Setting up the Wii to install and play backups from an external hard drive
Jailbreak your Apple TV 2
Install XBMC on your Apple TV 2

PS: Watching podcasts on the living room TV = WIN!
PPS: Playing music on all iOS devices throughout the apartment simultaneously = WIN!
These are stock Apple TV features, no jailbreak needed.

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Tags: apple tv, geekend, modding, technology, wii, xbmc

Resolutions

In: General

25 Jan 2011

It’s a bit late to call these “New Year’s Resolutions” but, regardless, here are some things I would like to push myself to do throughout the year:

Read and write.

There you have it.

I have recently taken up my old reading habit and I have to say it feels good to be back. I am both revisiting some of my old favorites (The Inheritance Cycle and Lord of the Rings) and discovering some new ones (The Hunger Games trilogy). Since November I have read: Eragon, Eldest, Brisngr, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and The Mockingjay (currently reading). Other books that have peaked my interest of late are: The Millennium trilogy, the Dark Tower series, and the Dexter series. My goal is for reading to take up my primary hobby slot while putting gaming, TV, movies, and geocaching on the back burners. This should be an easy task for geocaching as my friend and I usually only get to do it once a week, but as for the others it is going to take dedicated power of will.

Along with reading comes writing. I have never considered myself a particularly good writer but on the flip side, my writing doesn’t disgust me either, so I can live with that. But I really do appreciate having somewhere to jot down my thoughts and visually seeing them as well. I would like to post an entry at least once a week, but hopefully the spirit of dead writers will decide to move me more than that.

Now that these have been put in writing, I’m off to watch TV.