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I’m taking a break from my (not particularly) busy schedule to let you guys know that King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters came out on DVD today. The movie is a documentary that follows a guy named Steve Weibe in his quest to attain the world record for highest score in Donkey Kong by beating out the long time high score holder Billy Mitchell. I am by no means a movie buff, but I went out to see this movie because it got really good word of mouth review and it certainly appealed to my geeky side. However, I was surprised with how good this movie truly was.

Even though the subject matter might seem off-putting to anyone who isn’t a video game nerd, and admittedly part of the humor involves the other-worldly passions of competitive video gamers, the movie in the end is truly about someone trying to prove himself in the face of rivals willing to do anything to defend their pride. It’s like Rocky, except with Donkey Kong instead of boxing. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you would instead believe the overwhelming critical acclaim it has received. It currently scores a 96% at Rotten Tomatoes (the DVD box says 99%, but close enough) and 8.5/10 in IMDB ratings, so it certainly shows that it has wide appeal.

Next time you decide to rent a movie, you should certainly check this out.

Tags: movies, video games

I’m hanging out in Nacogdoches right now. I’ve been here for the past four or five days, and all in all I have had a relaxing and extremely fun time with most of the usual suspects and a handful of unusual suspects. Coming back to this town and milling around is a necessary recharge of my mental and spiritual batteries, and I think the idea of tackling on a new year with a renewed vigor would be near impossible if I couldn’t come back here. I think everyone who comes here over the holidays know that moments like this will only become more rare as time goes by, so we always make the best of it and it become a big love fest around here. Great times. I actually took ZERO pictures this time around, which is an indicator of the fact that I’ve been having too good of a time to think about taking pictures.

The combined Christmas and New Year’s break went very well this year. Christmas with the family was particularly good as we actually had a lot to do and everyone and everything got along without a hitch. Everybody had an idea of what should be in the Christmas dinner, so we compromised and put everything in the Christmas dinner. It was way too much to eat but easily the best holiday/family dinner we’ve had in some time. By some sort of default, I ended up manning the gas barbecue grill too cook about half of the dinner, and the Christmas miracle was everything came out (eh, well, chicken was a little pink near the bone…)

It’ll be difficult for me to go back to the grindstone at work tomorrow. We’re supposed to be hitting the ground running, and my co-workers are getting a day’s head start on me as I type this. I’ll be heading back to Austin sometime today.

My year can be summarized by a lot of the usual things: went through some interesting things, faced some interesting challenges, a lot of sucked, but a lot of good times were there as well, and all in all I learned a lot and came out, I hope, a better and wiser person. I’m hoping for more of the same in the new year.

Coming up soon: favorite albums of 2007.

As I mentioned before, my router is acting up so every now and again the port forwarding to my webserver ceases to work, so the website becomes unavailable for hours, sometimes days at a time. When I find the time, I’m going to take one my many spare machines lying around and put together my own router/firewall to deal with the problem (my luck with wireless routers so far hasn’t been very good). Until then, expect more foolishness.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Good luck out there if you’re doing any Christmas shopping.

Just wanted to put a quick post nothing the mini assault of new Genesis releases in North America tomorrow. I’ve already talked at length about the 1983-1998 boxset which covers the most popular Genesis albums, and each of the albums will be available individually remixed and remastered in a standard CD and DVD set with surround mix and extras.

A new live album will also be out chronicling the best performances of the recent reunion tour in Europe. Simply titled “Live Over Europe,” it is the full setlist on two CDs. The setlist is an amazingly well balanced combination of classic and epic fan favorites with well-known hits and is a pretty good sampling of the band’s career, and I would highly recommend it if you ever wanted to know what Genesis is really all about. A concert DVD of their performance in Rome will also be out in February, tentatively titled “When In Rome.”

Hey guys. Having a few issues with my router, so that’s why the server hasn’t been accessible. Which was okay, anyways, because I took the opportunity to upgrade the OS.

So after big Joe go married a few weekends ago, it seems that I finally feel free of outside obligations to go anywhere or do anything and finally getting some of my own personal stuff out of the way. I’ve been slowly cleaning the apartment up removing clutter, but the most exciting thing to happen to me as of recently is the purchase of a new mattress.

It’s an indicator of how wholly unexciting my life really is, but this new mattress is a big deal to me because it means I’m finally getting some decent sleep in…ever, really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a good mattress to sleep on in a regular basis, and I do mean that in the sense that just about every mattress I’ve had until now was of sub-par quality. Growing up I slept an old and worn out mattress. In college I slept on crappy value mattresses that were either part of the rental or were free throw-aways from other college dorms. When I moved out on my own, my parents gave me a full size that they themselves had 10 plus years to wear out. So now I have a brand new queen size quality mattress with a pillow top, and I’ve only had it since Tuesday, but I’m pretty sure I’ve already been sleeping better and waking up feeling better. I’m hoping that this will also put an end to the hours of lying awake at night and even the occasional sleepless night that I’ve been having for several years now.

Without going into too much detail, things at work have been pretty good as well. Our team at Cisco is growing rapidly and we have changed up our development process, and overall I think it’s greatly benefitting us. We’re due to move into some new office space at the end of the month, and I think we’re at the cusp of some exciting things. We were also told that our product has finally pulled in a pretty good amount of revenue for the company this quarter, which is sort of a first for us, so it’s helped renewed my optimism for what we’re doing. What has also been nice is that a few of our new hires are just-out-of-college guys with a solid sense of geek pride, so I’ve been enjoying finally having some people on the team that I can truly think of as my peers.

As usual, and like everybody else, I’m still trying to get the rest of my stuff in order though.

Hopefully, you’ll hear some more things from me soon.