Just In Case You Were Wondering… 70 Is the Age to Be

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Speech class has become a place where I take the prompts I’m given, and attempt to create entertaining pieces of work out of them. And while the answers to the question, “If you could be any age for the rest of your life, what would it be?” given to my class ranged from 3 to 35, I chose… 70.
When I brought this up, people told me they thought 65 was better. However, 67 is basically retirement age here in the United States. So by the time I turned 70, I’d have worked all the years I was expected to, and then, well, we’d get to the points I make in this speech. Anyways, have this rather twisted, overly optimistic outlook on old man life.

        As children, we wish to be adults, because we want to be able to do
all the things our parents can and don’t like being told what to do.
As young to mid age adults, people want to be children again because
they’ve quickly learned how stressful life can be. As older adults,
people want to be at retirement age, because who likes work? If I had
to choose, the age I would be for the rest of my life would be 70, —
because of the respect I’d get, the discounts, and not having to work!
        As a 70 year old, you get the senior discount at most places. Man,
wouldn’t it be nice to go out to eat, and get to pay the least amount
out of everyone because you’re more experienced at life? There’s no
reason for it besides how old you are. And because you’ve already
worked hard for years of your life, you don’t have to compensate it
further.
        Secondly, I wouldn’t have to work. Why, you ask? Well, because I
already did for 50 years. I spent 50 years saving up all this money so
I could blow it as an old guy. Man, that would be nice, you know, to
get to do what you want, when you want, and not stress about going,
to, work.
        And finally, respect. You see, unlike the 20 somethings fresh out of
highschool or college who don’t have a job, I wouldn’t be frowned upon
and told to get my lazy butt out the door; no, I’d still be respected
because I’m old. Man, I could sit there all day and eat nachos if I
wanted to, and still have all those youngsters trembling at the side
of my huge leather recliner with their “Yes sir” and “What can I do
for you, Mister?” Bro. I’m telling you, that’d be nice. I know, I’d
have to go through decades of constant work prior to it, — that’s how
the old folks earn their respect. But it would be worth it, if I
stayed that age forever, — never worrying about inferiors looking
down on me.
        So as you can clearly see, 70 is the age to be, at least for me. It
may not be all I crack it up to be, but hey. If things go south, I can
just yell at the youngsters to fix me a fresh plate of nachos. That’s
it for my speech today, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.

Yeah. I’m sure life’s not like that when you’re 70, but who cares. I was bored and in the mood to joke.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

A Successful Tournament

Hey guys,
Steve here.

I went through with it this time. I told you guys I’d be back to this blogging thing and… here I am 5 days later. Five long days, might I add, which were filled with stressful travel, painful but fun Goal Ball, and now school, I guess.

My first ever out of state Goal Ball tournament was a thrilling experience to say the least. As you may recall, last week I was both excited and nervous about it; the excitement was justified, the nervousness not so much. Out of all four games my team and I played, we won four.

Of course, there were nerves involved, two of the games we won by only three points, and most nerve racking of them all, the last game in which we played for Gold, we won by only one point. The game that I neglected to mention, we won twelve to four.

Despite Goal Ball being a bit of a pain in the butt… and the chest and the arms and the legs and the stomach… you get the picture, I really enjoy playing it and hope to go to another one of those tournaments again soon. But please, for the sake of my sanity, can we just get there without the airports? I think those were more stressful than the tournament itself.

That aside, life has resumed as normal. We returned to Texas yesterday afternoon, welcomed by dreary skies and the pattering of a dismal rainfall, a perfect match for the feelings provoked by the prospect of another daunting set of consecutive school days. Lucky for me, my week will only last three days. On Thursday, I’m traveling to the Texas School for the Blind for a weekend long program that familiarizes the blind with city travel. That’s right, city travel, no airports this time. Anyways, I’ll be there from Thursday until Sunday. I’m pretty excited about this one, because with it being based on city travel, I’ll basically be exploring the city of Austin for a few days, and from what I can gather it’s quite large, and there are numerous things to do there.

In the mean time, while I’m living the good old normal life for a few short days, I’ll get some work done on my projects. Also, if Danny and I can get some technical issues sorted out, we might be able to record a podcast. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those, but just as I have this blog I plan to go back to that at some point; if not this week, then perhaps when I’m not so busy.

That concludes tonight’s post. Depending on how much I get done code wise, I’ll give a progress update on my games when I blog next week. I probably won’t be posting until Sunday or Monday, because not much is likely to happen in the next three days.

Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

A Lot of Coding and A Lost Friend

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Tonight, I bring to you all some very sad news. Unfortunately, me and Nevaeh are not, friends. I tried to talk to her again the other day, but instead of replying, all she did was look at Danny’s I Pad, which he was using to Skype with me. Oh well, so be it. For all she knows, my name is Meow, I’m from the great state of Meow, I’m meow years old, and my ultimate goal in life is to meow. You can’t really blame her for never wanting to talk to me again, because judging by that conversation I’m quite a big loser. (LOL)
On the contrary, I actually have quite a bit to talk about, all of that being productive, well not really if my ultimate goal in life is actually to meow. But as it turns out, school is going along well this year, especially my Digital Interactive Media class, which is surprising since I was really scared at the beginning of the school year when I found out what the class actually was. I’m not talking about Business Information Management, the class I’m referring to is a massively visual class, where it’s barely the fourth week of school and Adobe Photo Shop is being used already. Fortunately, the teacher is allowing me to use that time to work on S Quad Racing, and setting deadlines for things, a plus since I now have another person motivating me to get things done. Anyway, he asked that I finish the regular racing mode, and I’ll be pretty well darned if I don’t. Maybe opponents won’t be perfectly matched with players, but he asked me to complete the racing mode, and he’s the only person pushing me to go forward, and I’m not letting him down. I have a lot of people who are proud, but he’s the first that is pressing me to get things done in a certain amount of time, and that’s what I’ll have to deal with in the professional workforce. And when telling him about the game, he especially got pumped about the Aggressive mode, and I will provide that to him by the time I leave his class in 8 months if it means halting progress on all the other aspects of the game until it’s complete.
Aside from that, the day after my last post, I finally broke down and employed a beta team for S Quad Racing, due to frustration at having to find and fix bugs on my own, bugs I thought were fixed already. I felt bad for them for having to test such a primitive product with so many bugs, but thanks to them I’ve been doing all the coding and fixing, and letting them test for the bugs for me to fix. This has definitely been a great help to me, because it lifts one of the most annoying jobs of being a developer off my shoulders, and results in me not having to sweep over sections of the game I thought I’d already tested through and through.
For one thing, today I solved all the crashing issues known to S Quad Racing, and also made it impossible for anyone working on a track to lose their work due to closing the application or it crashing. When I say I solved them all, I don’t literally mean I came up with a magic formula that made everything work 100% as I envisioned, however, rather than crashing, the program will simply log the error, notify the player, and save their progress. So, while I’m off coding a new feature, or doing something else entirely, the program will be logging vital errors, allowing me to pop over to that section of the code and fix what needs fixing, though my testers will still need to report bugs that don’t halt program execution to me.
Another plus side to this, is that now I’ll definitely be able to record the audio demo, without having to worry about the program hanging on me like it did in my last attempts. So, and I say this with the finality of a slamming solid stone door, there will be an audio demo by Saturday!
On a final note, I once again decided to revisit BGT, and am surprisingly grasping the subject matter fast, and more completely than ever. My main reason for doing so is a complex game idea I have, one that I’ll save for another post. For now, though, I am signing off, and will more than likely going to bed here shortly.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Back To School

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
Well I found out something very interesting yesterday! Apparently, it’s actually possible to carry out a Skype conversation with a… cat!
I was in a Skype call with Danny, trying to record an episode of my Podcast. However, Danny had to take a break in the middle to eat dinner. While he was gone, his cat started meowing for no apparent reason, so I meowed back at her to see if she’d answer. Guess what? She did! And since I still had the recording configuration used for my podcast set up, I was able to record a little ten second clip of it.

Maybe, just maybe, she was meowing for a totally different reason, but I’m humorous. So I say she was chatting with me. And it’s not like she can deny that… or can she?
Anyways, besides chatting with cats, life has been pretty good over the last month, even though school started back up last week. Most of my classes this year aren’t bad, well not really, although some of them are a real pain to get to, which is why I got lost twice so far.
Besides getting lost, I’m already getting homework. In fact, that started the second freaking day I attended geometry! However, the teacher seems nice and helpful, so I don’t think there will be any trouble there.
In addition to the homework, I’ve been having some technological issues in a few of my classes, and am afraid I’ll have to leave one of them for that reason. I don’t know what it is with Microsoft Office products, but they just keep going down hill in terms of accessibility. Worse still, they are practically a necessity in college and the work force these days, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do once I get to that stage of my life unless something can be done.
That said, Microsoft Office is practically the back bone of the class in which I’m struggling. So unless they manage to fix their accessibility issues, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pass that class.
On a more positive note, development with S Quad Racing, sluggish as it is, is going quite well. I had to fix some annoying bugs this evening, bugs that of course didn’t pop up until I tried to record the audio demo (figures). But rather than make sure all current bugs are patched up, I’ll just go ahead and throw together a demo recording, because in the next couple days I want to code in surfaces, but before I make such a big change to game play I really think I should get a recording of the game in its current state. Besides, that demo is pretty much 2 months over due, so yeah.
That concludes the posting for tonight. Be sure to stop by and listen to podcast episode 38, which demonstrates RS Games, and is as usual packed with mine and Danny’s twisted sense of humor. Please, listen to it. It took us 3 attempts to record that thing!
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

A slightly depressing week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Well yes. It was a pretty miserable week, at least last week it was. Well remember last Monday’s post, how I said I was no longer sick? Turns out I still was. I didn’t actually start feeling better until this most recent Sunday… so yes. last week was quite miserable.
This week, although by far a better week than last, wasn’t the happiest I’ve seen either. Some personal matters made this week sort of a bit of a downer if you will.
The recent times haven’t been all that bad, however, in fact I’d say I profited some. Because of the lengthy stretch of days I was stressed out or bummed out, I’ve done a lot of praying, of course–because that’s what people do in hard times. Also, I’ve been looking forward to church a lot recently, because every time I went the message was always something I needed to hear. On Sunday, for instance, on the umpteenth day that I felt sick, the message was this: be faithful and patient; it’s only temporary. God didn’t forget about me. It was so weird, because my preacher had inadvertently told me exactly what I needed to hear! So as you can imagine, that put me in a great mood.
And just yesterday, I was feeling upset about something else that had happened, but after going to church I was filled with joy and piece, exactly what I’d been praying for.
Needless to say, mainly due to church, this week has definitely been on the up. It’s already almost Friday, and tomorrow will be a not-too-stressful B Day. And, with that sickness completely gone, I think life is returning to normal. What a blessing!
Moving on, you’ll notice I haven’t done the podcast. Here’s why: I tried to record it, heck I even saved the file and opened my feed to update, and that was when I realized that a good 35 minutes of the podcast were gone! Due to that recording trouble, I’ll wait until tomorrow to do the episode. But since it’s over Alter Aeon, a fantasy game that’s been around since before my time but is still being updated, you are going to enjoy it.
As for books, I’m not finished with the Ender Wiggin series yet, I’m only on book 3, in fact, which I just recently learned is over 500 pages long. I’m serious, this author doesn’t cease to amaze me. His level of creativity and amount of thought he puts into these books is astounding.
Looking at an introduction he wrote for this installment I’m reading, this book wasn’t even planned! Isn’t it weird that the only reason he went ahead and wrote this in the first place, was that the publisher he’d been working with had published the Ender Wiggin series as a 3 book series, rather than just 2 books, which it was originally supposed to be, but our clever author was still able to produce such a great 3rd book?
Aside from my rambling rants about my recent readings, the weather here has well and truly gone crazy on us. Last weekend was very cold, with temps in the lower 50s and upper 40s… and Monday it was in the lower 40s. Tuesday, however, it began to warm up–and kept that up for all of two days! By Wednesday, the high temperatures reached 60 degrees, but guess what the high was today? 37! To top it off, it is expected to be nearly 80 on Saturday!
As for rain, the last time we had that was Sunday, and I don’t know when we’ll get more. I’m thinking we could get some next Wednesday, but not too sure about that yet.
Well, I guess that wraps up tonight’s post. I’ll blog you all later.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. Goal ball started up again, and I’m really enjoying it!

a pleasant week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I know I know. I’m definitely not the creative sort when it comes to blog post titles… but to my defense, that’s really what most of them have been about–weeks of my life, right? Anyhow, it is true, I’ve had quite a pleasant week. First of all, I got away with yet another semi-stress free week of school, with one big exception–I found out that I made a 35 on my most recent math checkpoint, so as you can probably infer I wasn’t really happy about that. Thankfully, however, I went to tutoring and got the problem solved, and as progress reports are coming out very soon, I’m hoping that test grade won’t cause me to fail. Another not so good thing that happened is that I was feeling pretty bad for a few days last week, a cold or something, but I am, and have been, feeling better since Sunday.
Moving on to more pleasant things, I’m really enjoying reading about Ender Wiggin; it’s fascinating. It is the most Sci-Fi book series I’ve ever read. For one thing, the first and second books were set 3000 years apart, and Ender Wiggin, the main character, is still around. It is something to do with relativity or something; he travels by star ship to different worlds, and he’s able to travel at the speed of light, so I guess time passes differently for him. I’m not really sure how such a thing is possible, or how science could possibly support that theory, but it’s an interesting concept, all the more reason I’ve come to like these books so much. While 22 years can pass for us, it can only feel like a week or so for Ender while he’s traveling at the speed of light.
Aside from books and school and the like, I’ve done more gaming, though not very much of it. Since this week’s podcast episode is over Shades of Doom, I had to download and play it, and of course it’s another good one. This game is pretty old, but some one suggested it for me, so I went ahead and demonstrated it. Apparently, for those of you who are familiar with such things, Shades of Doom is the first Audio FPS, contrary to my thought that it was Audioquake, a game I really don’t know about.
As for letting you hear me play Minuet, the pretty easy first song I’ve ever learned on piano, I haven’t forgotten. that is to be on this week’s podcast.
OK. I’ll quit stalling and just admit it. I haven’t yet done the episode. Just as I was getting ready to do it last night, I had to do a chore, then take some medicine that would help me sleep better, since I’m still a bit congested, so I couldn’t really do the podcast. I know, that’s not really a valid excuse since I could’ve done it earlier, but still. That’s what prevented me from doing at the usual time I record, around 9 when the house is quieter and I’m less likely to have disruptions.
Anyway, to end this post, I found out about Windows 10, the new release Microsoft will be coming out with. I’ve never in my time of using computers thought that I’d hear Microsoft say that they would be making a new web browser, rather than the old internet explorer we’re all so accustomed to. IE will still be shipped with Windows, though. Also I heard they’ll be implementing some sort of holographic technology? Man, sometimes, I wish I could see. Anyways, the link to the article I read is:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/21/technology/windows-10/index.html
Well, I hope you enjoyed this post. Please be on the look out for the musically doomed podcast episode…
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

a good but slightly tiring week

Hey Guys,
Steve here.
For the most part, it’s been a good week, the exception to that being school, of course. Though it’s not been too stressful, I could gladly take another break. I was pretty tired last week, though I can’t really complain because that’s mostly my fault. Despite the three day weekend we had, I’ve been tired all day, and my head’s been hurrting a little.
With the exception of those minor obstacles, my last week went by fast, and was quite enjoyable. To start off, I’ve read some pretty awesome books. As I said I would in my last post, I read Cress, the 3rd book in the Lunor Chronicals by Marisa Meyer. Since it was so long, and I’m a bit of a slow reader, I just finished it yesterday, and have now began the Ender Wiggin series. For some reason, this is the 3rd consecutive science fiction book I’ve read, and they’ve all had the same theme–outer space. I’m not speciffically looking for this type of book to read, though the ones I’ve so happened to stumble upon have immediately got my attention. When I finish this one, I’ll check out the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, because Danny has been quoting it, and told me that I would love it. And from some of the quotes he’s shared with me, I think I will. I don’t think this one’s a book, but an audio drama and/or a movie. Either way, I’ll subject myself to that story, whatever form of media it’s in.
Moving on, my friend from church came over this weekend, which is precisely the reason why I was unable to record my podcast, for those of you who follow that.
On a sort of related note, I’ve been learning Bach’s Minuet in G Major, and for the most part have the song memorised. There are still a few parts I need to work out, but I think that I might be able to let you hear me play it in Sunday’s podcast.
As for weather, it’s not really been too harsh on us lately. Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were cold and rainy, but after the sun came out on Thursday, it improved. Today, in fact, it got up to 70, something it hasn’t done since… well I can’t remember. But tomorrow it will be 10 degrees cooler, and another 10 degrees cooler on Thursday with rain. So much for pleasant weather…
On the technical side of things, I haven’t done much in the way of programming, except a small text to speech application. This application has actually enspired me to create some audio productions with the all to famous microsoft Sam, that good old low quality text to speech voice that came with the long discontinued windows XP. Perhaps I’ll air a few of them in future podcast episodes.
Speaking of the podcast, I know it’s been 2 days since Sunday, when I was supposed to record, but I wasn’t about to podcast while I had a friend over. Though he went home late yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t yet downloaded the game I was going to demonstrate, so I had to download and familiarise myself with it. I’ll record the episode and have it up tonight, though.
That concludes tonight post. I’ll blog you later.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.

A great week

Hey guys,
Steve here.
So far, that is for the last 12 days, 2015 has been quite a good year. I’ve been pretty good about sticking to my goals for this year–consistent podcast schedule, a good blogging routine, piano practice ETC.
There have also been several other factors that made the last week and a half such a good time for me. Firstly, I received a report card last week, where I learned that my lowest grade (that includes 3rd six weeks, semester averages, and semester exams that I wasn’t exempt from) was a, 90. Not that I was really worried; I try to be responsible with my school work most of the time, but I still wasn’t expecting that.
Also, last week wasn’t very stressful. Contrary to what I previously thought, the first week back at school did not come as a harsh slap in the face; waking up bright and early once again wasn’t all that difficult, though I was pretty tired the first few days I had to do so. The work wasn’t too hard, though I suspect it’s because it was the first week of a new semester. And between practicing my piano, doing some here-and-there programming, talking to my friends, reading, and recording pod cast episodes, I haven’t had much time for boredom.
Speaking of reading, I’ve started a new book. Recently I’ve been reading later installments of book series, because either the service I use to get audiobooks doesn’t have the title I want to read in their listing, or I procrastinate too much to read it when it comes out. But anyways, after finishing the final installment to the heroes of Olympus series, I read Day 21, the sequel to the 100 by Kass Morgan. Now, I’m reading Cress, the third installment in the Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. As good as these books are, I kind of wish I’d read them sooner, because even now I’m still remembering details from previous books in the series.
Moving on, as you might have noticed, I never again mentioned the winter weather event that was possible for New Years Eve and New Years Day. For one, I forgot to mention that, and secondly it wasn’t worth talking about, because it all ended up being just rain. Even on New Years Eve, there was still a 70% chance of winter precipitation in the forecast, and a winter weather advisory had been issued. However, by midnight, the forecast had changed, and only a slight chance of freezing rain remained, and even that never came to pass, making the whole event just a couple days of cold rain. So as you can see, definitely nothing to get excited about.
On the technical side of things, I’ve done quite a bit in the way of coding and gaming over the past 10 days. To start off, Paladin of the sky (found at http://www.vgstorm.com), was the center of my gaming world for 3 days, before I finally reached the end of the demo. Whether or not I will buy the game is still under heavy consideration–as much as I like the game, and the story, there are some parts (namely the combat system and room sizes) that I don’t like. But I really, really like the story, so who knows; that actually might inspire me to purchase it.
Also, park boss has been another recent favorite of mine, though after playing that a lot for a week or so, I kind of lost interest in it. I haven’t even opened the game in a week now.
Speaking of games, Danny has released another installment to the death match series. it’s called Death Match: a new beginning. I’m not sure of all the features it has thus far, though I know that the last time I played it, you could fly ships, and explore planets. Danny told me of another feature he’d added, but I cannot remember what it was.
Also, if you haven’t played death match: project alpha yet, you definitely should. great story, awesome style of game play. Both of these games can be found at his website: http://realitygaming.usa.cc
or the audio games.net forum.
And Finally, I’ve been dabbling a bit in pure basic again, as was briefly mentioned earlier in this post. Though I haven’t produced anything useful, resourceful, or even enjoyable, I’ve been messing around with things such as text to speech support and the basics of game creation. Just today, in fact, I learned that for some reason, the Pure Text to Speech library does not like the idea of compiling Unicode executable files; every time I’d try to run an Unicode executable that used text to speech, I was greeted by an application crash and invalid memory access error. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, because I don’t know what that error means either). Luckily, with the configuration of some compiler options, I was able to finally resolve the issue. This means I can actually move forward and begin to bring a game idea I have into reality. We’ll just have to see though.
Well, I guess that about wraps up tonight’s post. I hope you all enjoyed it. I’ll blog you all later.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

I'm back, at long last

Hey guys,
Steve here.
At long last, I have returned from my extended break from this blog, and it is definitely good to be back. Though I’m sure you agree with the preceding statement, You are undoubtedly wondering why I was gone for so long.
This time, the main reason I was gone for such an extensive amount of time wasn’t “lack of motivation,” which seams to be the primary excuse most bloggers use for inconsistent writing. Instead, the primary factor in this most recent absence was my highly addictive gaming habits. Just recently, in fact it was around the time of my last post, I got really addicted to Quentin C’s game room, that social platform featuring a wide variety of card and board games that I demonstrated in an episode of my podcast. Since Quentin C’s game room has so many games, as soon as I would lose interest in one game, another would take it’s place. That being said, I had no inclination to sit down and write a post, as it would’ve given me less time to play games. On the bright side, however, I posted the Road to Rage podcast, and it turned out to be quite awesome, as Danny and I played while talking over Skype resulting in a near half hour of constant joking, laughter, and battle; 3 things that normally don’t go together.
aside from that, though I still find Quentin C’s playroom quite addictive, I’ve remembered the truth–my blog is much more important than my games.
Besides spending a lot of time on Quentin C’s game room, my life over the past month has been dotted with the occasional significant event. First of all, there was sports extravaganza, which took place the week after my last post. Since I have attended this event every year since I had this blog, I will not go into an in-depth explanation. But to summarize it, for those who don’t know, there was a goal ball tournament on Friday night, then on Saturday there were track and field events all day such as races and other competitions.
Besides Sports Extravaganza, my church also had its annual fall festival last week. Not much to say about that–it was quite fun, and I spent the day with someone significant to me. On a related note, I also got to spend this past Sunday with the previously mentioned individual.
As life would have it, unfortunately not every day was as good as those I just talked about. There was still that struggle called school, but on the bright side today was an early release day. There was also another early release day last month, after my last blog post, and I must say that was a lot funner than today. While there were still only 4 hours of school today like the last time, and there wasn’t too much work to do in my classes, it was still unlike last month when I had the extremely rare luxury of sitting in one classroom all day long, having absolutely no work to do, and spending the whole time reading and playing cards.
On a completely unrelated note, the weather the past couple days has been unseasonably cold, thanks to an arctic blast that is affecting a lot of the United States. Fortunately, though the high temperatures here in Texas are not in the single digits, as they were in places such as Denver, and our lo temperatures aren’t -21 degrees below 0 as they were in places such as Casper, Wyoming, our high temperatures didn’t even hit 40, and the lo this morning was in the 20s.
In addition, there is also a, slight, chance of snow Sunday night. Since that is far away, it’s impossible to determine if we will get any accumulating snowfall yet. However, I will closely monitor that situation, however since it is so early in the season I’m not very optimistic.
Well, I guess this wraps up tonight’s post. Thank you for reading, and as I previously said, I am very glad to be back.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.
PS. My cat turned 10 today. I cannot believe he is already that old!

gaming and podcast updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
Alright, I have to admit something. I’ve been slacking off, quite majorly, especially in the pod cast department. I had a very good chance to record the Road To Rage Episode last week, as a quite horiffic battle took place between my friend and I and two other players, who not only seamed to have an unlimited supply of health, but also some wickedly awesome guns, some of which were capable of putting someone down in 3 quick shots. All of that resulted in a 15 minute streak of epicly loud gun fire, frustrated screams of agony over the chat system, and people dieing left and right. Although my ratio of kills to deaths was something along the lines of 2 to 6, I still had quite a good time and wish I’d recorded it. I suppose one of the main reasons I didn’t record it was that I was on a time crunch, and it can take a good minute after a podcast is recorded before I can officially say it’s online, and also that was on Wednesday, not Sunday.
But anyways, I’ll be sure to definitely record it this time, even if it means recording it before Sunday and waiting until then to post it. Either way, expect podcast Episode 25 this Sunday, and I promise, for real this time, not to let you down.
Besides slacking off the pod casts, I’ve done quite a bit of swamping over the past two weeks. I haven’t updated you guys on my swamp progress in a while, so I suppose I’ll do that now
-I’m level 84 now. If I’d become level 84 in a previous version of the game, such as 3.1 or below, I could’ve become a hard core character, something I’ve been wanting to try out. But no, I have to get to level 150… so I still have quite a few more levels to go. On the bright side, I’m over half way!
-Since Christmas day, I’ve spent 1 week, 1 day, and about 2 hours, playing the game. All that, plus the time I played on my old computer, and I’m still not even level 100 yet?
-I have some pretty nifty armor at the moment. I’m still able to move fast, but get >70% protection.
Also, I have a long bow, and a very powerful machine gun, so I shouldn’t be dieing any time soon. I suppose that’s something to be excited about.
Anyway, off the topic of gaming, my last couple weeks have been more or less uneventful, besides school, doing a bit of technical work with my friend’s website, and as previously mentioned, playing games. Very early this morning, I managed to catch a rather epic storm recording, the result of a pretty good hail storm that came through, dumping a whole bunch of what appears to be nickle to quarter sized hail. (yeah, leave it up to Severe Storm Steve to get up at 4:00 in the morning to record a thunderstorm). Anyhow, here’s the recording:
download and listen on your pc
or here’s the imbedded player:

To me, that sounds a lot like the ice storm I recorded back in December of last year.
Moving on to the future, I have a choir concert next week. Apparently we have to wear a tuxedo, and I still don’t have one. I really need to get on that though, because I’m not going to get a poor grade because I wasn’t in propper clothes.. Also, report cards are coming out this week. I feel confident that I’ve passed all my classes–last time I checked, I had a 92 in algebra, a 98 in business information management, and I don’t know what the exact grade is, but I’m passing English. As for History and Spanish, I really have no reason to be failing those classes, so I’m pretty sure I’m passing them.
Well, it’s kind of late, so I should be getting in bed right about now. I hope you enjoyed this post, and I look forward to writing another. Also, stay in tune for the podcast next Sunday.
Thanks for reading,
Type you later,
Steve.