blakerson.com

Off I go tomorrow to Padre! It's sure to be crazy in the Casa de Greg this weekend. I'll be getting home late Sunday and in town for the whole week relaxing and playing through Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes (it's amazing already). If you didn't pick up a copy, well you got screwed, cause they were $30 at Fry's today. I'm bringing my laptop and mouse, so I should have adequate computer use for anyone who wants to get their CS ownage on. It's gonna be a nice short week of R&R along with some great moments with the old-school amigos. See you in A-town, kids.

Update: I'm home! There was much insanity, many cool things happened, and many new experiences that will long be remembered. Kinda crazy how much action you really can fit into a 48-hour road trip. There are some photos of the good clean fun that took place which will go up once I'm back in Austin, since I didn't bring home the camera gear. It's great to be home - after sleeping 10 hours (at last!) I managed to spend the whole day indoors - chillin on my mom's computer, watching G4 (which I missed a lot) and playing some Twin Snakes. Now that the glare's out of the living room I'll be checking it out tonight on the 5.1 system and bigger-screen TV down here. Oh, and the food I get to have here! My mom really likes to go out so tonight was Pei Wei down by the Parks. Insanely good food, great (and fast as hell) service, and not as expensive as a typical sit-down restaurant. It's from the guys who own P.F. Chang's, so you get the idea. Highly recommended.

-Drive
-Drive
-Drive
-SSB tourney
-Drive
-Get new boxers
-Catch up on Anime (more Initial D / Naruto / start Final Fantasy Unlimited)
-Start some more games (Twin Snakes, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell mission pack, finish DX2)
-Ridiculous amounts of chillage with the amigos
-Drive

So a P2er showed me this: AllofMP3.com. It's a legal-mp3-download site based in Russia - so you can buy your music (lots of it American and European) by importing it - and not importing into a library, I mean importing from overseas. It follows Russia's copyright law and you're paying for your music - the 'unlimited download' rate comes out to $10 per GB of music, and you can choose the bitrate at which you download (anywhere from 128 to 392 I believe. I searched for a handful of popular artists I like and I got some pretty decent results: most of the really good artists (BT, Orbital, etc) don't have complete collections, but the albums they do have are complete.

So, if you want a cheap alternative to iTunes and like MP3s, give it a shot.

So just when we had awful SG elections, the Diversity Task Force, and tuition increases out the wazoo, I finally experienced a silver lining.

Gaming: The Housing people opened a lan center in the basement of Jester. It's surprisingly cool. 16 very well done Dell boxes with Logitech headsets and 21" monitors on Radeon 9800s, along with a couple plasma screens and vending machines as well as Bawls coolers. I went to a soft-opening party courtesy the TGA (of which I'm working on becoming an officer) and walked home with a flash drive worth $30 at Fry's. That'll almost buy me a copy of MGS Twin Snakes, which is out real damn soon. While TGA used to host weekly game nights in a lecture auditorium every Friday night (yeah, taking over projectors and plugging in consoles is awesome), they've been moved downstairs to what they're calling the LanCave. It's $5/hour, which is expensive as hell, but I'll show up for cheap-gaming specials and tournaments for sure. The place is quickly becoming a sort of safe haven / hangout for gamers all over campus, which is what I always wanted to see happen with TGA's help. I'm glad to be getting involved with it all.

Just to be sure, this puts my winnings this semester at $270, after knocking off the $10 I paid to enter the Mario Kart tournament.

Bawls: The University started selling Bawls in cafeterias and snack shops. At $2.25 a bottle, we really don't care how expensive it is since most people have excess dining money anyway.

Filesharing: Someone on campus started a DC hub that works across the whole University network. It's a crazy network they have here - you can only see computers in your own dorm, but you get internal transfer speeds (roughly between 600K/s-1MB/s) between any computers connected to the University at all. So, now all the l33t people who live in dorms are hooked up by DC with insanely fast transfer speeds that don't count toward our bandwidth quotas (between 4 and 8 gigs a week, depending on how much you pay). There's maybe 50 users connected on average, and there's roughly 2TB of stuff going around already - and this hub just got started. Since I found out about it earlier this week, I've managed to get 10 gigs of stuff I needed, including:

-another copy of Splinter Cell (old CDs got scratched)
-BT - Ima (a good rip)
-The full Cowboy Bebop soundtrack collection
-Initial D (which I couldnt fit over Christmas)
-Swordfish
-Two Eddie Izzard routines
-Two episodes of Extreme Elimination Challenge (I LOVE this show)
-Squarepusher - Music is Rotted One Note
-first two episodes of Final Fantasy Unlimited (haven't watched)
->Daft Punk - Daft Club - a brand new remix of Discovery, and it's awesome. Grab it.

But, yeah. Lovin' it here.

We (brown sound will want some credit but we really did it together yo) proudly present to you:

Four new GI Joes.