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Friday - March 30, 2007

Wilmington arrival

We have arrived in Wilmington. We're staying at the Hilton which is decent, but nothing terribly exciting. We are on the top floor though, and have a nice view of the Cape Fear river, and the USS North Carolina battleship (pictures to follow soon).

For dinner, we ate at a historic restaurant named The Pilot House. The house was originally built in the 1870's, and had a nice blend of traditional traditional Southern food with modern seafood. Lara had the jalapeno cornbread encrusted flounder, and I had the Pancetta wrapped shrimp skewers. Both were very good.

The Pilot House is beside Elijah's, and are both owned by the same person. Supposedly, Elijah's is one of the locations frequented in the television series, Dawson's Creek. Go ahead, I'm sure you can mock me for knowing that.....

Posted by jcraven at 8:13 PM | Comments (1) | Misc

Thursday - March 29, 2007

More Canadian goodness

Previously, I mentioned my obsession with a Canadian candy bar called Coffee Crisp. Well today, Lara and I we browsing the junk food aisle in Target for snacks that would be trip-worthy. Amazingly, she came across a giant shelf full of the lovely goodies. Of course, we didn't even hesitate and picked up two bars (seen below). Sure enough, the wrapper lists "Imported from Nestle Canada". Awesome..... hopefully this isn't a one time shipment, and they will catch on with others down here.

Posted by jcraven at 12:08 PM | Food

Wednesday - March 28, 2007

360 Elite officially announced

Not a huge surprise, but MS unveiled the new 360 Elite yesterday. For $479, you basically get HDMI and a 120GB hard drive (and it's now black). I'll probably drop the cash on the new hard drive, but doubt I'll get the whole new console. It's nice that it comes with a transfer cable to migrate your old data. We'll see......


Posted by jcraven at 10:07 AM | Comments (1) | Video Games

Wednesday - March 21, 2007

Shadowrun first impressions

Today, Microsoft released the NDA on the game I've been playing recently, Shadowrun. The game is loosely based on the popular tabletop RPG (of which I have zero experience). It's an interesting blend of typical FPS action and RPG abilities. Think Halo crossed with WoW.

First, you can play as multiple races, Human, Elf, Dwarf, or Troll. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Also, at the beginning of the match, you can 'buy' tech and magic upgrades. This is where it really starts to mimic your typical RPG. You can choose healing and resurrecting abilities and magic spells, or just go with big guns and grenades, or any combination. All magic and special abilities use 'essence' aka mana. So far my favorite setup is a Dwarf with the Summon ability. Dwarfs are small so a little harder to shoot, but they do move slower because of their short legs. Summon is similar to WoW's warlock class, and the summoned minion can work as offense or defense.

Considering the game isn't finished yet, it's still quite fun, and the graphics are quite nice. I don't know if there's much longevity in the game, since the beta only includes the multiplayer deathmatch/CTF type scenarios. Will the single player be any good? Only time will tell.

Posted by jcraven at 2:36 PM | Video Games

Saturday - March 17, 2007

Pet food recall

Since almost everyone I know owns a pet, be sure to check out the following recall. There's almost 50 brands of dog food and 40 brands of cat food affected. Already, 10 pets have died from the tainted food. Check it out now.

Posted by jcraven at 8:39 AM | Comments (1) | Misc

Friday - March 9, 2007

ASU tournament campaign

GoASU.com has details on the full page advertisement in the Indianapolis Star's Friday edition. Pretty cool. Be sure to keep an eye out for the Mountaineers, Sunday @ 6PM on CBS and ESPN.

Posted by jcraven at 3:02 PM | Sports

Monday - March 5, 2007

New stuff

Picked up a new chair over the weekend, and it was on sale: Black High Back EZ Executive Leather Chair. So far it's a great chair, and very comfortable for multi-hour use. It will take a while to see how it holds up in the long run.

To go along with the chair, a new wrist support: IMAK ergoBeads™ Mouse Support, 5 3/4", Gray. I think this may be the best wrist support I've ever used. For years, I've used gel-based supports but this one is even better. If I didn't have a ergo-keyboard, that has a built-in wrist wrest, I'd probably get the keyboard version too.

A week or two ago, I picked up the Logitech® Harmony® Advanced Universal Remote for Xbox 360. Any Harmony remote (or any decent learning/programable remote) can control the 360, but this remote also has 360 specific hard keys (X,Y,A,B). I don't use it for day-to-day TiVo watching, mainly because I love my peanut remote too much. It does make it very easy to switch between components though, which is especially helpful when Lara wants to watch a DVD or play Xbox when I'm not in the room.

Finally, for Christmas I received a TiVo Glo premium remote (black). Like I said above, I love the TiVo peanut, and this is the new version that incorporates learning functionality. This eliminates the need for two remotes in the bedroom, since the TiVo doesn't have codes for my LCD Television which I mentioned a while ago. Why did it take me this long to start using it? Well, it had a little problem learning commands from the television remote. For some reason, the remote was sending out duplicate messages, so pushing the power button would actually send out 2 power commands. The result was a quick 'on/off' on the TV. The solution, was to use my Harmony remote above (which has the codes in it's database) to send the appropriate commands for the TV to the Glo remote. This worked great, and now we only have one remote in the bedroom.

Posted by jcraven at 2:07 PM | Comments (1) | Tech