It’s a slow Thursday for some reason. Usually Wednesdays and Thursdays are pretty busy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case this week. Good for me I guess. Still, the weekend can’t come soon enough.

So it was my birthday last weekend. I hit the big 26. There was a decent amount of drinking and way too much food. Good stuff. My parent’s paid for my motorcycle classes and my brothers got me riding gloves to take the tests. I seriously can’t wait to get my license next month.

Getting older isn’t fun. What most people would call their quarter life crisis, I’m calling my mid-life crisis. Seriously, I need to start eating better and exercising more or I’ll be dead by 50. About a month ago, I started to cut back a lot on the fast food. There’s probably been about two or three times I’ve gone fast food since there. That’s a pretty big cut considering I was eating there nearly every day. The girlfriend’s been a big help with that. She’s turned me onto actually buying stuff from the market and cooking it myself. It’s turning out to be way cheaper to so I got that going for me. Look ma, I’m cookin!

As for the exercising, that’s a different story. We’ve tried to go on hikes and walks together, but I hate that. It’s so freaking boring. I’d much rather be playing a sport or something to that effect. So when I ask if we should go play tennis, we reverse roles and it’s her who usually doesn’t want to. Shit, I haven’t even been to the beach this summer yet. How can you live in So Cal and not go to the beach? Maybe this weekend. Bottom line, I need to get out of the home and get in the sun.

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I am not a fan of basketball. Too much individualism, less of a push on team play, too much showing off, and way too many crybaby players pretending to fall to draw fouls. It’s not a damn diving competition. Anyways, I bring it up because you can’t be in Los Angeles this week without hearing about the Lakers. Seems to be the big discussion at work the last couple of days. “Shaq’s gone. Thank god!” Thank god? Umm, from what I understand, we just lost the most dominant player in the NBA. They probably would have said the same thing about Kobe if he left us too. I guess I’m just tired of hearing about it at this point. Actually, I should be the last person complaining about basketball considering hockey may not even be around anymore. I’m really not sure why people don’t watch it.

Alright, enough bitching for now.

BBC News has some neat little animations that explain Cassini’s mission to Saturn.

It’s back to work today. At least I can look forward to the short work week. Everyone have a good 4th? Mine was ok. Little bit of booze, BBQ, and fireworks.

I did catch Spider-Man 2 again. Man, that movie is just as great the second time around. The video game also got surprisingly great reviews so I picked it up for Xbox. It’s awesome. More than awesome. They recreated the entire city of New York and you can go dive, swing, and crawl just about anywhere. It’s absolutely huge. A completely different game from the previous ones. I need to just get home and play right now.

Lindsay Lohan turned 18 last Friday. Happy birthday Lindsay. It’s ok for us to date now.

Grant, my friend from Arizona, is coming out to Cali from the 20th to 24th. That means I’m gonna have to reschedule my motorcycle classes and certification on the 23rd. The next earliest time to do it will be August 12th I think. I really wanted to get this thing done before summer started but oh well. Guess I’ll just have to wait until the fall now. Fun stuff.

Alright, back to work for now.

I had the very great pleasure to catch the 12:01am showing of Spider-Man 2 tonight. Let me tell you right now, this flick is going to stick around for a while. It wasn’t better or worse than the first movie. Much of the same really. We do get a lot more story and a lot more moral issues thrown into it. That’s all good, but what makes the movie so great is time this flick was released and how it relates to these times.

In these strange days, it’s hard to look around and ignore the blatant evils in this world. From wars that should have never been started, censored and manipulated media being fed to us, government corruption, our own country’s “leaders” (who were never to be trusted in the first place) making decisions solely based on self gain, and reality tv shows, I would say it’s extremely difficult to even imagine what people were like before these evils existed.

Spider-Man 2 counters this evil. It uplifts us and gives us hope that no matter how much bad there is, you can always make a difference. It shows that anyone could be a hero and that turning your back on certain issues or just ignoring them all together is doing what could be a just society a great injustice. It lets you close your eyes for just a little bit and imagine what could be accomplished if you decided to do something about the wrongs you see in the world.

Peter Parker struggles with this throughout most of the movie. Even though he has the power to do and be something really great, he only sees the negative effects of these actions in his personal life. He feels as long as he’s Spiderman, the people who will hurt the most are the people he’s closest too. These struggles we see in the movie are some of the absolute best scenes here and are only topped by when he eventually understands that answering the call of the city for Spiderman is what is best for him and the society around him. You, in fact, see how common citizens feed off of Spiderman’s will in order to gain their own inspiration. You simply can’t help but cheer for things like this.

Spider-Man 2 is an exciting, smart, beautiful, funny, and absolutely inspiring movie that can relate to anybody and I highly recommend you see what is clearly not just one of the best comic book flicks every, but also one of the best movies of the year. Maybe it will inspire you to do exactly what I think underlining meaning is… By letting your actions be seen and your voice be heard, you can be your own hero.

Note: I edited the original post slightly because of grammatical mistakes. What do you expect at 4 in the morning?

A Tuesday morning at work. Great. At least I have Spiderman 2 to look forward to later tonight. Midnight show baby! This one is gonna be good. Real good. Everyone is saying “the best comic book movie ever”. Bring it!

So Jobs previewed the next version of Mac OS X to the public yesterday, Tiger. Looks like it’s gonna be good (like I would have said anything negatively anyways). Safari is going to have its own RSS aggregator. Very nice. You are able to check out a video demo of it if ya like along with the entire keynote to watch Jobs work his magic. Also, check out Dan Gillmor’s article on Mac OS X 10.4 for a little more insight.

It’s Wednesday and that means we’re half way to the weekend. I was planning to go to Arizona this weekend but that looks like it’s gonna fall through. My girl—— finally found a place to live and she’s gonna need help moving in on Saturday. I’m ecstatic if you can’t tell. Oh well. Next time I guess.

So there was this sale on DVD at Target (go figure) last weekend and I picked up American Psycho and Torque. Haven’t checked out American Psycho yet but Torque was pretty cool. Make no mistake about it. Torque is absolute crap, but it’s really freakin’ cool crap.

I picked up a game yesterday that I’d been waiting to come out for a while, Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising. It’s a very large scale, realistic, first person shooter using modern warfare that’s suppose to compete with the Battlefield series. Let me tell you right now that this thing makes me not want to even load up Battlefield again. You get to choose what type of character you’ll be playing (rifleman, sniper, pilot, etc…) and then you get dropped into a huge world with 149 other players online where you can drive any vehicle or pilot and ship. Pure awesomeness! Let me give ya a scenario that happened yesterday when I was playing. I got into the pilot seat of AH6 Little Bird helicopter. 4 riflemen loaded up with me. I took off and was then greeted by 2 AH60 Blackhawk helicopters with two gunners each that offered me cover and escort to our designation. As soon as we got there, the two Blackhawks immediately went into cover patterns around me as I landed and let out the 4 riflemen. I then took off and helped protect the base with the 2 Blackhawks. And all of this happening with bullets, RPGs, and stinger missiles from major opposition (also controlled by real people) flying by your cockpit. Now that’s just exciting, especially when it gets pulled off so fluently and with people who play the game seriously. Bottom line… get Joint Operations.

One more thing. Gmail is still freakin’ cool. They gave me a good number of invites to send out to friends so if you want one, just send me an e-mail at roguegeek@gmail.com.

<plug class=”shameless”>
I might not be updating my site, but you can’t say that about my friend Mark’s new blog. Drop by and say hello to Mr. Ding.
</plug>

Just because I haven’t posted in a month doesn’t mean the site is abandoned. Quite the contrary really. I’ve reworking it yet again. Maybe you’ll see something up by the end of the weekend.

I got myself a Gmail account already and it’s so freakin’ sweet. IE on Windows is rock solid with it but Safari on my Mac is still a little twitchy. It’s mostly contacts management that screws up on me. They could also add in some sort of importing functions to use your current contacts from whatever program you’re using. Other than that, it’s sweet. I don’t mind the ads at all. In fact, they’re so unintrusive and specific, I’m actually enjoying them. As soon as the service gets out of beta and goes public, grab an account.

Send me some e-mails with specific topics so I can play around with the search functions and ads. You can e-mail me at roguegeek@gmail.com. Thanx.

I was cleaning house on my AIM buddy list today. Why? I had reached the maximum of 250 buddies per list. There’s no way I have that many people I talk to so it was house cleaning time. Most of them were girls I had met through Hot Or Not or something like that. Don’t really need that anymore so… DELETED! Any, it got me thinking that I still might have my HON account active. I went to the site and, sure enough, I do. Canceled that too. Can ya believe it? I must really be planning on staying with my current girl—— for a while if I deleted all of that.

Did you guys check out the biggest bomb of 2004 yet? Looks like a big old load of crap to me. Halle Berry isn’t even that hot to really have that role to begin with.

So I’m about a month into the new name change for my blog and I’m already hating it. I need help thinking of a new one. Something that still sounds kinda generic but a lot less… feminine. Any suggestions? Seacrest out!

Unlike last year, there was no slack in software this year. That goes for all platforms including Nintendo (strange, but true).

After what I thought was the terrible Wind Wakers game, Nintendo will be releasing a real Legend of Zelda game. Thank God! We’ve had way too many years of dealing with crap Zelda games. We also have Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I didn’t think the first one was great and I really can’t see how this one will be any better.

PS2 has some great exclusives as usual. Sly Cooper 2, Gran Turismo 4, Devil May Cry 3, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, and Grand Theft Auto: San Adreas all look to be definitely buys.

Xbox has their own laundry list of exclusives. As if Halo 2 wasn’t enough, let’s throw in Fable, Dead or Alive Ultimate, Conker: Live and Reloaded, and Jade Empire. Oh, and EA has announced an agreement to bring their games to Xbox Live and that can’t be bad.

Then there’s all of the PC games to look out for like Black & White 2, Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, Matrix Online, Everquest 2,

Finally all of the other games for multiple systems like Splinter Cell 3, Metal Gear Solid 3, Driver 3, Burnout 3, Starcraft: Ghost, and Doom 3,

Yup. This year is looking to be a good gaming year. Bring on E3 2005!