If I had to describe Tough Mudder in 2 words, the nicest version would be “holy hell”. If you don’t already know what it is, Tough Mudder is an adventure-style race. It’s generally 10-12 miles, littered with obstacles. And the obstacles are crazy.

Laura and I were on a 4 person team, “Birthday Cake”, as it was one team-member’s birthday. Beside Laura and I, the other two ladies on the team (Buffy and Erinn) are women we know through Columbia Athletic Club, the gym we go to. Well, actually, one of the ladies on our team is a trainer at Columbia, who Laura sees regularly, and who I’ve been working with once a week since the “spring challenge” starting in April. Anyway, back to the race challenge!

Easton is now almost 4.  I figured I’d have a “part 2” to follow up on the original part 1 before this, but, you know.  Things.  They come up.  So I’m a little behind schedule on this one. :)

• “Gwirl” (rhymes with “Squirrel”.  This is how he produces the ultra simple word “Girl”.  It is one of the funniest things he says.  sometimes I try to correct him, and he says “no, it’s gwirl!”  If you didn’t hear it all the time, you probably wouldn’t notice it.  but now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll hear it too.
• “my friend pogo-stick” – for a while, we think easton had an imaginary friend that he had named “pogo stick”.  no idea where it came from.
• “my friend robin” – now he’s in a HUGE superhero kick, so now his imaginary friend is robin.  So that’s a good thing, it means that he’s the lead, and he has at least one sidekick.  So tonight before bed, he was looking through his books, and said “I don’t want to read this one, I just want to look at it to see if Robin wants it for his birthday”
• “This sounds like a job for [superhero]!”, where [superhero] is whichever super-hero shirt or pajamas he is putting on.
• A whole set of words where he just drops the first (few) syllables.  I’m not sure if this is just the hip new thing that kids his age are doing to save typing on twitter or what:
  • "-chine" for "machine"
  • "-cado", for “avocado”
  • "-nected" for "connected"

Like I said last time I built something, every time Laura and Easton (and now Barrett) go somewhere for a week,

I end up doing some project that consumes all of my free time, and half of my sleep!  I finally have some time to sleep in and relax, but no;  I do a woodworking or home improvement project instead.

This spring, same thing, for the third year in a row.  The project this time was a “garage” for all of the toy cars we have.

For my home development projects, I’ve been using the “Basic” setup of Microsoft Team Foundation Server for years. I have it running on my “server” box in my garage, but pointed at a Sql Server Express database instead of a full Sql Server install.  (Apparently, there’s going to be an explicit TFS “Express” version in TFS11?)

Aside: why am I not using something like github?  To keep my stuff private, I’d have to pay ~$7/month for 5 repositories.  the way I have things setup in TFS right now, I’d have more than that, requiring their $12/month plan.

They say, “Variety is the spice of life.”  That’s almost the perfect description for my 3rd trip to the Ben Avery shooting facility during our annual spring break trip to Arizona.

This year, Jimbo, Art, and I shot trap again, but rotated through a set of shotguns to see which one we liked (or which ones liked us) better.

The trip to Ben Avery is always one of my favorite parts of the trip, even if it is only a couple hours of our week.  This year, I even remembered to bring my earplugs and shooting glasses.  One of these years, I’ll have a trap gun of my own, and maybe I’ll bring that along as well.  And maybe by then, Easton will be joining us.  But that’s a long way off :). 

About 5 years ago, we redid my office. Well, now that there’s another little being on the way, my office is transforming back to bedroom form. So i had to update my office again. This time, there ended up being a little… well, consolidation. An entire room of stuff is now in this:

Over the years, “Nerd Central”, as my office was once known, has slowly gone from 3 computers, 2 monitors, 2 printers, a television, surround sound receiver, a small mixer to manage the sound output to one set of speakers, and a huge random assortment of other electronics down to just a single desktop computer and xbox with a single monitor and computer speakers, and the 2 printers (one inkjet, one photo)

I don’t know what it is, but every time Laura and Easton leave for a week, I end up doing some project that consumes all of my free time, and half of my sleep! I finally have some time to sleep in and relax, but no; I do a woodworking or home improvement project instead. Last May it was redoing the stairs. This year it was a cabinet for the theater room for dvds, games, books and things. We couldn’t use a floor standing one, as that corner of the room has an electric fan forced heater that requires clearance space. So the cabinet had to be a wall mounted one. Sounds like a project!

Alan Wake was one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long time.  The story was an actual story.  Well, it was really a story about a story, in the form of a game about a story.

A lot of companies have tried to do some kind of “episodic” game, and of any, I think this game could have actually pulled it off if it had been released that way.

The game begins in disappointment: you’re forced to install a console game.  So before I can even do anything, I’m forced to wait 8 minutes.  Great initial experience there.

During the install I’m forced to watch a dude on screen chain smoke the whole time.  Some of the “hints” it gave during this install (emphasis/commentary added):

• konami is not responsible for any damage resulting from misuse (misuse of what?)
• this game is intended for use exclusively with the PLAYSTATION3 system. (no crap, really? is that why its only available on the PS3? where else would I play it?)
• cigarette smoke has detrimental effects to you and those around you, particularly infants and children.
• put litter in its place.  dispose of ashes in ashtrays.
• ensure that you play in a brightly lit room and sit as far away from the screen as possible (except sony makes this impossible, as I need to charge my ps3 controller, and the cord they give you for that is like 3’ long, and apparently the controller only charges if the PS3 is on!)
• avoid playing when you are tired
• be sure to take a 15-minute break every half hour
• if you begin to feel ill, stop playing immediately

THANKS MOM, for the life coaching while waiting for your game to install.

On March 29, 1911 the army adopted the John Moses Browning designed M1911 pistol.  And today, 100 years later, the 1911 is still used by some of the special forces groups of the military and is still one of the most popular handguns in the world. 

The first gun I bought was a 1911 pistol.  It is still my favorite handgun to shoot, although shooting a lot of .45 gets expensive!  So I bought a Marvel Precision .22 LR conversion that allows me to shoot .22 LR,  and then I bought another (used) 1911 so that I didn’t have to keep swapping the conversion on and off.  The collection has grown, but I still shoot both of those pretty often.  I’ve even used the 45 in pistol league a few weeks, and it’s a lot of fun! 

Last year, Art took us to Ben Avery Shooting Facility to shoot some of his guns, and we had a grand old time.

In what has become an annual tradition, we went again this year during spring training. But this year, instead of rifles and revolvers, this year was all about: Shotguns!

Jim and Art used over/under Browning shotguns, and I used a browning single shot. We then each shot ~60 birds of trap shooting. Ben Avery is a huge place, with something like 18 trap fields, so the 3 of us had a trap field to ourselves. This was good since neither Jim or I had shot trap before, and we didn’t want to slow anyone else down.

While Torchlight has been available for the PC for a long (long!) time, it just came out last week on Xbox 360 as an arcade game. And it is a great game! It’s probably the best value for an Xbox live arcade game so far. I can’t believe how much stuff they fit into that ~400 meg download!

It wasn’t the best story ever, but I thought the story made more sense than Borderlands! The side quests were ok, but I think I “broke” some by going through the area and doing something before I got the quest for it. There were other things where I swear I scoured the whole level, and the thing that was supposed to be there wasn’t there. And I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking when there was so much other stuff to do.

This is one of the few sequels that doesn’t have a number or subtitle.  It should be something like “Medal of Honor: Tier 1” or something, as the game was mostly following some Tier 1 special forces operators through the storyline.

Like the Call of Duty series, I played through MoH on the hardest difficulty (until I saw the “Tier 1 mode” or whatever that I didn’t go back through and play).  But unlike recent CoD games on hard, I didn’t see any real “bugs” with the “good guy” AI.  And the special forces guys in this game could shoot.  While you, as the player, still have to do the majority of the work, the computer controlled players could at least draw fire and provide cover so that you could flank the bad guys.  So for this game, I don’t have to write a version of my “letter to my idiot squadmates” posts.  The effectiveness of my squad did make the game feel a little easier than CoD, but it did make me feel like a good player on a great team, instead of the great player on a crappy team.   However, the game not being as hard didn’t make the game any less enjoyable.

This is the (by my count) 7th game in the Call of Duty series. Of the recent ones (since CoD:Modern Warfare), this one had the best story.

It had a very interesting psycho-drama going on, with the main character being captured and interrogated by someone, causing flashbacks. The missions occurred in the flashbacks, not entirely in order, and interestingly, sometimes without clear beginning or end. I liked that. Several times you’d be what you’d assume 3/4 of the way through something, and then you’d see something that didn’t make sense, and you’d get shocked back to the interrogation. I thought I had figured out what was going on, but I hadn’t. I like it when a game keeps me guessing.

Red Dead Redemption was one of the best games I played in 2010.  Well, I’m finished playing it in 2011, so it might be the best game I played in 2011 too :).  If you haven’t played it, its Grand Theft Horse, basically.  Same developers, same engine.  But the story in RDR was a lot more interesting to me than GTA was.  I think when you set a game in modern day, you really have to get every little detail right, because people’s brains are so used to seeing that stuff, that you will notice if the cars are too shiny, or the windows don’t reflect right, and all kinds of other things just won't look quite right.  But when you set a game in the wild wild west, not a lot of people are used to riding horses, or herding cattle so you aren’t going to notice little things that are incorrect. 

AC2 was probably one of the best games I’ve played this year. Most of the time sequels aren’t as good as the original, but this one was as good, if not better than the original. Yes, it was a little formulaic, and there was a fair amount of repetition, but I really liked the story. It had one laaaaaaame moment, but I’ll let it go and see if AC3 cleans it up. I thought the addition of the interaction with Leonardo Da Vinci was pretty clever. There’s also a part now where you kindof run a city in a very minimal way, so that was an interesting way to make money. Towards the end I had so money I didn’t know what to do with it all, so I wish there would have been something else to do with it :D

Now that Kinect for XBox360 has officially released, i’m allowed to say that we participated in the beta program for Kinect, and that we’ve been playing it now for a few months. (i even got a avatar t-shirt and a 0 point achievement, yay!)

There’s a very simple reason that i’m buying it: Easton can play it. He’s only 2, and doesn’t have the dexterity to do anything with a wii-mote or an xbox360 controller, but he can run in place, and he loves to play Kinect. Supposedly, the recommended minimum height for players is 3 feet, but for the most part he can play some stuff.

Well, probably more accurately, “things which easton says or mispronounces that i find funny”. Right now all the ones i can think of are single words. he’s starting to form sentences so i’m pretty sure there will be funny phrases for a future installment.

• “Zune” is easton’s word for “phone”. I really wish i had my zune still (lost it on an airplane…) so he could be even more confused.
• “Bean” is easton’s word for “beer”. “Daddy’s bean” is what he says whenever he sees a glass bottle of any kind. even though he says other words that end with the “r” sound, he will not say beer, he just says “bean” louder if you try to correct him
• “Coshee” is easton’s word for “coffee”, although i think last weekend he started saying it right. He loves to run the coffee machine weekend mornings, and seems to enjoy the taste of even black coffee. I don’t know if its because he likes to copy me or if he really likes the taste. He does like raw garlic and onions though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he likes the bitterness of coffee.
• “Shark” is easy’s word for “fork”. sometimes its just “sark”. The weird thing is that he can say the “f” sound, so i don’t know why he won’t say fork.
• “Fi-fi” is what easton calls Felix Hernandez. But most of the Mariners call him that too, so that’s okay.
• “Pay-pay” is what easton calls Peyton Manning. I’m generally pretty anti-Peyton, but he’s my fantasy QB this year, so i root for him, but against the Colts in general.
• When he sees cats, or squirrels or other small animals outside, he will generally say their name, then say “eat”. The conversation goes like: “Meow. Cat! Eat?”, “no, we don’t eat cats.” “eat? no eat.”

I’ve been going to a pistol league at Shooting Sports Northwest for a few weeks now.  I’ve never competed in any gun related things before, so this is a first for me.

There are 3 events every week, and you shoot each event twice.

The first part is called “zombies”, and is worth the most points.  10 rounds, 9 targets.  the back row of 3 poppers pops up, and is up for a few seconds.  Then the middle row of 3, then the front row of 3.  The zombies are scored on distance;  the back row is worth 20, 18, 15, middle 12, 10, 10, putting the front row at only 7, 7, 7.  Most people will use as many rounds as they can to get the back row.

Hey, that rhymed!  The story in Bioshock 2 wasn’t as quite as good as the original, but was still very good.  Helping the little sisters harvest was pretty cool.  The big sisters were a clever idea.  the most interesting part was the part where you see what the world looks like through a little sister’s eyes.  That was pretty cool.   Like the first game, the art direction and theme were magnificently done.