more. Which is sad, because I really like his folk/dowhateverIwant style music. On the upside though, he will be joining a band that will be  ”meaner” and more “rock n roll” which he says is completely the opposite of what he has been doing previously. He says this with excitement though, and I’m excited too. I like mean.

While we are on the topic, In January Drew started “Reliving the 90’s” video series on Youtube. He picks out some of his favorite 90s songs and then covers them, interpreting them in their own way. Each episode (released monthly) focuses on a different musician and shows the recording process and usually its just really fun(ny). So far there are 4 episodes with the first one being my favorite. Katie Brandeburg is not only very beautiful, but also has an amazing voice. I really should have gone and seen her show in Rexburg. Grr. Anyways, watch the series, its great.

If you want to hear Goodnight Dannii for free, check it out on Drew’s website. Its really good.  If you like it (you do), consider buying a copy.

Gordon, why do you have an apple on your chest?

Lots and lots of Valve news lately and I think they made  the right move by releasing this huge wave at us all at once.

   Okay, so the first thing. February 25th-ish. First found on the Steam forums. With the Beta of the new Steam client were some OS X icons along with a dock icon. What does this mean? Well there was speculation. Some thought that it could just be a skin for Steam that Valve was working on. Others thought that maybe, just maybe they were making a version of Steam for Mac users? Crazy idea? Maybe, but I thought it was very likely. But my question was this, why would OS X icon’s appear in a client where they aren’t even being used yet ( whether in a skin or the Mac application) ? It could be because it’s beta and they are being a little lazy accident, but I think it is more likely that they wanted to get some hype going. An intentional leak, if you will. So I’m kinda excited at this point.

   Then comes March 1st (so glad they didn’t do this a month later), and Valve’s game Portal got an update. I didn’t notice this myself as I haven’t used Steam or played any Valve games in a long time. But this update’s patch notes read this: “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” That’s it. Nothing else. It obviously doesn’t make sense. People all over the internet banded together in IRC chats, Google Waves, and forums to solve this mystery that involved turning sound files into pictures, deciphering the meaning of those pictures, cracking md5 hashes, finding telephone numbers that end up being a modem for a BBS that linked to lots of images and creepy emails from a dead CEO. Well very very long (and still uncompleted) story short, turns out this is some viral marketing and ARG that Valve has set up to get the hype level rising even more. Hype for what though? Many suspected a sequel to Portal (which was confirmed only hours ago as of this writing), and other’s thought maybe the the third Episode of Half-Life 2. It was confirmed in Half-Life Episode 2 that the Portal and Half-Life stories are somehow intertwined. If you want to get the full account of what has been happening over the past few days, check out this Wiki that was set up by the people in the IRC. ALL the information is there and a lot of people, including myself have been working really hard on it to get everything archived. This Portal Puzzle Overview page will give you a summary of everything that has happened so far.

   Okayy. So now while everyone is working on stuff for this ARG, Valve sends 6 different images to six different Gaming sites. What are these pictures of? Well take a look. They decided to take the not-subtle-at-all approach with these pictures. Valve has stated that these pictures are “In anticipation of an upcoming announcement from Valve.” and that it is coming “soon”. So as of right now, everyone is pumped. Valve did a great job at getting everyone excited. Right now everyone is happy, PC users, Mac users, and Portal/HL fans. Well done Valve.

Direct image links.
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Theories

My theories? I think that Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 3 will be launched together at the same time, similar to the way Orange Box was. I also think that Episode 3 will delve into the relationship between Portal and Half-Life and finally reveal how the story lines intertwine. But my favorite theory is this, it will all be released for both PC and Mac at the same time, on the release date.

Anyways… I’m going to go play some Portal.

A few days later I went to a birthday party that Justin and another friend of mine, Dillon were also at. We started talking about Final Fantasy which immediately sparked a conversation between Dillon and Justin. Both agreed that Final Fantasy 7 was the best game they had ever played because of the amazing story line. After awhile Dillon had the idea of having a Final Fantasy night.

Here was the plan: Each of us pick an installment of Final Fantasy, get 3 Playstations and 3 TVs in 1 room and all play at the same time. We would each play, and when ever someone ran into a cinematic sequence, everyone would pause the game and watch the clip. It was like a LAN party without the LAN.

We agreed that the idea was awesome and on New Years Day the plan was put into action. We set up 3 TVs in my unfinished basement and started our nerd-fest. That same day my dad had scheduled a DirecTV guy to come over and do some stuff related to well… you know, Satellite TV. As we were playing, the guy game into the room we were playing in walked behind the TV to put an end on the coaxial cord coming out of the wall. At that moment I was in the middle of a battle in my game. As he squatted down to do his job, he turned to us and asked “Are you playing Final Fantasy 7?”. To which we all looked at each other in awe and stated that we thought it was ‘freaking awesome’ that he knew that just from hearing the battle theme music. He smiled and then told us that he loved that game and he had an original sealed copy of the game back at home. Isn’t it a little weird that the day we decided to play Final Fantasy in the basement, my dad schedules a fellow Final Fantasy fan to come over to our house? Life is full of surprises.

‘I haven’t felt the way, I do today in so long’ -Incubus

When it comes to memorable moments, you never know when they are going to sneak up and surprise you. Some of the best, in my case, have occured during the most random of times and completely on accident. This is the third sentence to the introduction of my story.

Setting: I’m this fresh out of high school graduate, so naturally I take the first chance I get to get off on my own and start college. Since I couldn’t enroll for day classes yet, I decided to move out and take some night classes. A mere 2 classes is all I managed to enroll for. Both of these were held on the same day giving me 6 days of wasting my life away on WoW and 1 day to actually apply myself. Life wasn’t as good as you would think. Being lazy for extended periods of time blows.

So one day I was sitting in my 3 hour (7-10pm) ‘Intro to Humanities’ class grudgingly half listening to the professor lecture about renaissance painters who like painting blurry pictures of stupid stuff and music that didn’t even have a guitar solo. During this time I would zone in and out of caring about what this guy was talking about depending on the topic of the discussion. Well I started to zone out right about the time he brought up the word ‘Opera’ singing. While he was searching for the video clip on his computer, which was a nice new iMac by the way, I went rummaging through my backpack looking for something more interesting than opera. Anything would have done it because fat women wearing viking helmets and making weird noises doesn’t really interest me much and I don’t really see how anyone else can appreciate that. Its officially on my ‘Top 10 Stupid Crap’ list, and it isn’t coming off anytime soon.

A pencil is what I usually choose to fiddle with during boring classes, but I happened to see my Apple-branded remote first. These remotes are used with Apple products, in my case, a laptop. It took me a couple seconds of weaving it through my fingers to realize what awesome potential I had to make this dull class a little more fun. The conditions were perfect. I was sitting on the back row of a small theatre-styled lecture hall with the iMac up front connected to a projector on the ceiling. Now most Macintosh computers can be controlled with any Apple branded remote unless specifically disabled in the operating system’s settings. I wasn’t sure whether the tech crew of the school would have disabled this feature or not, so I stealthily pointed the remote at the computer up front and attempted to adjust the volume. And sure enough, it worked.

At this point the professor was just finishing up giving us the background information for the opera he was about to play for us. He gave the last few details then made the video wide screen, pressed play, then started walking to the back of the room to watch it with us. Just as he was about to sit down, I pressed the pause button on my new best friend. Confused, he stood back up, and walked back up to the computer to resume the video. Five feet before he got to it though, I pressed the button again which made the video mysteriously start up again. Even more perplexed, the teacher shrugged it off and again walked back to his seat to ‘enjoy’ the opera. What do you think happened next? Yep, you got it. I did it again a couple more times until he looked like he couldn’t make up his mind as to where he wanted to be. The remote was looking more and more like a device to control my professor rather than the computer. Thoroughly confounded and frustrated, he started looking up at ceiling projector trying to figure out just what was happening. The class just confused as he, tried to help by offering advice. Among these, I heard ‘Its because it’s a Mac!’ and ‘Maybe you have a virus’.

I decided to stop for a couple of reasons. One being that I didn’t want to totally ruin his lesson. The other being that my friend, who, sitting beside me caught on to what was happening. He demanded that I stop because he didn’t think he could go on any longer without laughing hysterically and therefore blowing my cover. I agreed as I didn’t think I could either. As I let the lesson continue on without any further interruptions, I occasionally chuckled to myself which earned me odd looks from the serious students who wondered what could possibly be funny about an opera. They had no idea.