Game comes out at midnight. However my console of choice is not the Xbox.

So I came up with what I thought was a great idea for a Halloween Pumpkin. You see I play this very addictive puzzle game called Critter Crunch for the Playstation 3. So my though was how would I make the little - let's call it a beard. then I remember seeing that if you carve away the outer pulp of a pumpkin you can have a nice little glow effect. So I thought I would give it a try.

I was doing just fine, until I got to the larger more »

Stick around for the end of this Modern Warfare 2 Trailer.

In honor of the Packer season and the passing of our beloved dog Molly one year ago I found this video of her chanting her go pack go. It's not her best performance (I think she was a little camera shy) but it is sadly the only one I got before her passing. We miss you Molly, Packer games haven't been the same since.

The other day my neighbor Dan from next door handed me two tickets to the Packers/Bills Preseason Game for last nights game. Watching the Packers from the comfort of your own home is great, don't get me wrong, but there's just something that can't be beat about going to a Packer game.

It's been awhile since I saw the Packers live in the stadium but it was like visiting an old friend. For one you get to see what goes on in between the commercials and how they pump up the more »

After two months of waiting we finally got our photos back. I am so happy with them. Dan (from artessence photography) was wonderful to work with. Photos were really important to me since it is the only thing we can easily go back to from our wedding. No we just have the hard part of picking 80 out of close to 300 to go in our wedding album! Once I get a chance I'll be putting most of them online. You can view them in the gallery.

So this is my first attempt at writing a blog, so bear with me please. Anyhow... I will be done with work in just over an hour and a half.  Then I'm heading home, finishing packing, convince Jeff that 8 hrs on a plane will be fun and finally kiss my fur children goodbye for a week. I have wanted to go to Costa Rica since I was a little kid so I am very excited. Where else in the world can you go snorkeling and lay on the beach one day, hike through the jungle the more »

On May 16th 2009 Kim and I got married. It was a wonderful ceremony and reception that went off without any major issues. I couldn't be happier to call Kim my wife and I look forward to a long life together.

While we figure out what this new site is going to look like I thought I would publish some of the images from the wedding. These are from the disposable cameras we put on the tables. It was interesting looking at all the pictures to see everyone's perspective of the evening.

Thank you everyone for more »

I was happily making my way to work on Monday, well as happy as I get waking up before the crack of noon, being the night person that I am. There was construction on the highway as there always is this time of year and traffic was at a stand still.

As I inched forward the traffic merged into one lane and all the vehicles were redirected off the highway. Luckily I had my GPS because I am not that familiar with the Appleton area, but as I looked over the barrier on the overpass more »

Embedding seems to be disabled but here is the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

Well, I'm back online tonight. For some reason I felt the need to dismantle all my PCs yesterday. Some of the parts of some of my system don't really work so well. Like my DVD drives seen to have gone the ghost. My hope was that with the spare computers I have around here that I would be able to make one fully functional one. I did accomplish that but I didn't really have to take everything out of every case including the power supplies and motherboards.

Anyway, let this be a lessen to myself. Inspect the machines first before you more »

My replacement PS3 died on me last Friday night. I was having just a wonderful time playing Killzone 2, and Call of Duty when all of a sudden the screen locked and the system shut off - BY ITSELF! The words that came out of my mouth I won't repeat here but none the less I scared the dogs with all my yelling and the party cleared out pretty quick.

When I called Sony I asked then why the first time they didn't try to recover the data from the hard drive. The lovely more »

UPDATE: I got it back right before the release of Killzone 2. To my dissapontment it was a completely new PS3, which means that anything stored on the the hard drive was gone. Which was quite a bit of game saves and even downloadable stuff. The PSN games I could just redownload, but the game saves are gone forever.

2 weeks ago I was pumped to come home from work and download the new KILLZONE 2 Demo and give it a whirl. It had been something I was looking forward to for weeks and I rushed home more »

It's no secret that I'm pumped for this game. Although this clip has been used time and time again it still makes me laugh. Be advised there is a lot of swearing.

Seems some hackers had some fun at the expense of morning commuters in Austin Texas replacing road signs with warnings of a zombie invasion. The funniest part of all of this is considering how the mainstream press likes to point the finger at video games for every abnormality of the human condition they completely missed the point. Because as anyone who has ever played Call of Duty: World at War knows, Nazi zombies more »

If you like surprises do not watch this video. For everyone else, Feb 27th is just too far away!

I've uploaded some new pics of the bathroom. I would normally say that it is finally completed, however Kim would like the wainscoting back on the wall so eventually I will need to do that over the winter. Kim would also like the faucets replaced at some point.

As with all project around here. Nothing is ever very easy or quick. If I hadn't mentioned it before we needed to completely remove the floor to level it, move some electrical and some plumbing. There was also a lot of damage behind the wainscoting that needed more »

It has been over a month since I unwrapped my copy of SOCOM: Confrontation. I can remember at the time being giddy with excitement for the next generation of SOCOM that I had fallen in love with (figuratively speaking) almost a decade ago.

I hooked up the included microphone and remembered the first time I did the same with the original SOCOM. The microphone was made a little cheaper back than and it had a long cord attached to it that I always seemed to wrap my leg into. I remembered as I put the more »

Say hello to Curie. On Sunday October 12th Kim pulled me away from painting the bathroom to go to the Bay Area Humane Society again. You see a couple of weeks ago there was a border collie behind the glass doors where all the new animals were kept until they could be cleared for adoption. On Sunday she took a helf day to see if the new border collie mix without the picture on the BAHS site was the dog she wanted to meet. That dog was not there at all, not behind the more »

Things are very different around here today. There's an emptiness in the hallways and the rooms. Everyone is not themselves. There are sad days within this house today that make it feel a little less like home. There's no go pack go packer cheers, no head placed under my hand as it hangs over the arm of the couch to get an ear scratch, no whining from the corner of the room wondering where dinner is, or to go outside. That's because things are very very different around here today.

On Saturday, August 30, after more »

We've begun working on the upstairs bathroom. Yes another home improvement project.

Although this one is going a little easier than the first, mostly because I knew that it wouldn't be easy. But I've seen enough rotten floors for a lifetime. This one wasn't as bad as the last and we had to rip up the floor anyway to level it after 80+ years of settling.

It amazing the things you can find when you rip up the old floor boards. There was a light globe (the glass you place over a light fixture), a golf ball, more »

It took forever but the bathroom is done. All but for a couple small things. It took so long because I couldn't just drop the work week and finish it and even then sometimes I just didn't feel like messing with it. We had a couple of plumbing problems along the way and I really have to learn to "measure twice, cut once".

Overall I am very happy with the results. Einstein likes it so much that he just lays in there all day long.I have to strip the door and stain it, stain more »

What the fourth of July for but to Celebrate our nation's independence, grilling out, blowing sh!t up and getting fall down drunk. I managed to do all those things, but not in that particular order over the course of the day.

The party was another huge success. Somehow we managed to go through just tons of food and we even ran out! Sorry bout that to those in attendance, we'll get more next year. It was great having all our friends over for the day. I got to catch up on a lot of things I've more »

Great News! Veronica Belmont has a new job! Today Sony Announced Qore. A subscription based television series, think a video magazine. The shows can be up to 2 hours in length and work much like the scene selection of a DVD so you can watch what you want and when. Also included in this new service is access to exclusive betas, demos, wallpapers etc. The service will cost $2.99 per episode or $24.99 for 13 episodes. Did I mention Veronica Belmont was the host?

All that sounds really interesting, and I am all for people getting paid for more »

Today didn't start out very great and just got worse as the day went on.

I woke up at 8:30, again, and called Menards to see if the west side store had the toilet that we purchased that the East side store neglected to tell us they didn't have. As it turns out they did, my father and I rolled over there to get it, order the flooring which we didn't do the day before because we were a little unsure of the square feet we needed.

I more »

Two weeks ago I did a very unhandy thing while trying to change the guts of the downstairs bathroom toilet. Somehow while trying to remove the flush handle from I managed to get the nut crooked which made it impossible to get off. So I did what anyone else would do when confronted with this situation and got a vice grips and started turning. Soon enough I heard a very distinct and short crack and knew immediately what I had done. I cracked the tank. Not just a little bit mind you. more »

Kotaku has a posting asking which consoles its readers own and it got me thinking about some of the consoles I used to have when I was a kid. The first system to enter out neighborhood when I was a kid was the Atari (I don't think it had a number way back then). I would go to my friend Bill's house after school and from that moment on I was completely hooked and have been ever since.

My first system was a Colecovision, I must have been around twelve. It had everything more »

Seven years ago, shortly after I met Kim she wasn't feeling well one day so for some reason I got it in my head to make her chicken dumpling soup. I grilled the chicken (I think it just tastes better that way) cut up the vegetables and threw it all in at once - including the dumplings that I tried to make. So for about 3 hours we waited for the soup, really the dumplings, however after all that waiting the dumplings were huge. Like the size of golf balls huge. And the middle was still completely raw. And even more »

I lit a match yesterday and somehow the burning sulfur, mixed with the smell of warming dust on th afternoon windowsill reminded me of my family's cottage. I laughed at myself for just a moment when I realized it, of all the silly things to think about.

March is kind of a grimy month. If mother nature isn't dumping one last snowstorm on us, all the snow is melting, making everything a sloppy soggy mess.

As I let my mind wander in the happy thought I began to think about summer. By far my most enjoyable season other than that little part more »

Kim is on this big health kick these days because she wants to lose some weight for the wedding. So when I ran across this today it made me laugh and I thought I would share.

I try to keep this blog on a cheery note but I received some bad news again this week. On February 27th 2007, my uncle Phil from my mother's side passed away from complications due to lung failure, For that past couple of months I have been receiving word from time to time about his failing health and today it seems his body was just too weak to go on. I did not know my uncle very well. While he was in the service he was stationed in Greece where he met his wife Mary and had their three children. more »

So today I rented a couple of movies and one of them happened to be Rob Zombie's Halloween. I enjoyed the film and as horror movies go it was much better then the big budget crap that they have been putting out lately (do we really need another Prom Night?). However Kim did not.

For those of you Interweb wanderers that happen upon this blog and do not know who my lovely wife to be, or I are, I should let you know that more »

So I have been working on a new version of the blog software which is why I haven't posted in awhile. There is the start of a member's page and comments are activated so now you can really tell me what you think of me.

The site is looking like utter crap right now but I was more concerned with getting this thing up and running again than how it looked so I can starting to look like something, and I'm testing the new commenting system and building the member's page.

I will be going on a small vacation in more »

My game library is nothing to sneeze at. Not that I have much time for such things anymore but, and I thought I'd never say this, the first person shooters are getting a little old. Sure i have Metroid, and Mario, and Okami, and just about every final fantasy game ever made but I want something more. I have no patience for the plethora of delays that seem to be the staple of the Playstation 3 brand at this point.

I want something to scare the sh!t out of me. Something that I can sit in the dark with my surround more »

I got this in my email the other day. It was so funny I nearly spit soda all over my monitor while watching them.

Jeff Gerstman, an editor at Gamespot may have been recently fired because of the poor review he gave for Kane and Lynch: Dead Men. So the story goes Eidos Interactive, the makers of the game, didn't like the review (above) and pressured cnet networks to fire him. No one can say if that is true or not at this point but what if it is. What would have happened if everyone that gave lair a bad review, which more »

The other day for no apparent reason I was in a bad mood and took it out on Kim a little bit. You see, since she started nursing school I only get to see her about an hour or two a day and for some reason that particular day I told her I couldn't wait until she was done so we could have our life back. In the process I hurt her feelings (duh) and fiercely apologized for it later.

Today, I realized how much of an idiot I can be at times and as epiphanies go I happened to find more »

I find myself saying every year, "Next year I am going to start working on Halloween decorations much sooner than October 1st." This year, once again, I found myself busy with other things and decided that I would have to limit my list to just a couple, well, one really. I was still putting the finishing touches on the front porch I had to rebuild with the help of my father, because my dog Einstein knocked out the front windows by saying hello to a passing dog. Before I could even think about more »

I just thought I'd write this down for posterity because i am sitting right next to Kim right now as she is playing Heavenly Sword. I have to say it is a bit amusing because she is really getting into it. She is fighting Whiptail right now and here is an example of what she is currently yelling at the television. "Oh, you are so gonna pay for that you b!tch! you are going to die a miserable death."

This is funny because in our house I wanted Heavenly Sword and Kim wanted more »

The story is slowly filtering through the masses and I am getting phone calls and emails from people scolding me that I have not mentioned it to them but on Friday August 24th I asked Kim to marry me.

Though I thought the possibility of a long engagement would be feasible Kim is already making plans for 2009.

I don't think I have to say that I am so very happy as I most definitely would not have asked her if I wasn't. And as anyone who knows us can assume she said more »

I was listening to Leo Laporte's Tech guy podcast (or netcast as he likes to call them) this evening while doing a little work and he mentioned a YouTube video he had seen about a water buffalo, crocodile and some lions that sounded like one of those things I just had to see for myself.

I won't get into the details too much, but a group on safari captured this video of a more »

Here is the first in-game shot of Killzone for the Playstation 3. Looks pretty good to me. I simply can't wait until the press embargo is lifted on this one. For the full size image go here.

Today I was doing some research for a new project and I found myself getting very very annoyed and a little angry. Not because I couldn't find what I was looking for, but just the very sad state, even today that some designers pass off as acceptable websites. This is not to say that my designs aren't flawed in any way. As soon as I'm finished with a project I can find one or more things I would have done differently. I am also well aware that sometimes you have to do what the client wants.

I wish that more people more »

Just got an email about a RFOM tournament. I noticed that the first round is conversion, which I'm not very consistent in.

Resistance Fall of Man is a game for the Playstation 3 that puts you in an alternate WWII where aliens (or are they) take over all of Russia and Europe.

Conversion is a last man standing game played online where normally you get two lives. Once as a human and once as more »

You know that scene from the first Ice Age movie where the sloth (sorry the name escapes me at the moment), lit his tail on fire? Yeah well I almost did a similar act of my very own yesterday.

Kim had brought home some shishkabobs and asked me to start the gas grill. I turned the gas on but the igniter wouldn't kick in to start it. After a few seconds, I told Kim to get me the lighter, all the while pressing the button trying to get it to light the gas that was slowly surrounding me. more »

Just got back from a wonderful vacation in Red Granite near Oshkosh WI. I have a cottage there and like to go there at least once a year (if not more) to relax and get away from the computers for awhile.

We didn't really do much there, just kinda hung out and sat around the firepit. I finally finished my Clive Barker book Abarat, that I've been reading on and off for a year now. I just don't have the time to read anything other than computer and business books these days. I've been meaning more »