Andrew Underwood

Home for a while

I’m in the Crowsnest Pass until I decide to go back up to Edmonton and eventually find a job. Saturday I’m heading into the States with three friends for skiing/snowboarding in Whitefish. We will be there over new years. That’s the skinny on my schedule… On to complaining about Internet Explorer.

While I’m at my parents place I am forced to use IE 6 for browsing if I want to use high speed internet. Browsing with this thing is like having to sleep on a hard bed after being used to your usual much softer bed. Alright, I suppose there might be more imaginative analogies but it’s all I can think of spur of the moment. There’s no tabbed browsing, pages don’t render properly (even this page), and inferior autoscroll are the things that annoy me the most. In conclusion: IE bad, beef jerky good.

The bell tower

City Hall is adjacent to the block where I live.  It sports a bell tower chock full of different sized bells capable of producing a wide range of audible tones.  Every hour during the day it plays some cutesy song, followed by a sequence of evenly spaced tones to indicate the hour.  It’s starting to annoy me, and the thing is it’s not repetition that’s the culprit.  It sure has a wide range of songs it can play, from themes from “The Sound of Music” to the usual Christmas melodies.  The annoying thing is that it tends to “oversing” everything.  It throws in lots of extra notes, sort of like those people who sing the national anthem at sporting events.  You know what I’m talking about.  Whoooaaaoooowhaaa oooohhhhhweeee hoooooowooowooo!  I especially hate this in regular music.

Funday

This fun day took place on Saturday, it all started with me going to the mall and buying a boat load of things I needed.  Coincidentally I bought some jeans and then later in day the older pair of jeans I was wearing ripped.  Almost as soon as I got back my roommate Michael came home too, at which point we ventured back to the mall.  City Center Mall is really close and thanks to pedways we are only required to walk outside to cross the street.  Thus going back and forth to the mall is really convenient and sometimes justified.

This time we went to the video game store to get an extra Xbox 360 controller.  During our time there we tried out the new Nintendo Wii.  A off-road racing game was loaded, and the steering is done by physically tilting the controller.  It’s fun, give it a shot next time you’re in one of those stores… if you’re ever in one of those stores.  It’s the cat’s pajamas.

Upon arriving home we started playing the new Gears of War game in co-op mode for the Xbox 360 with the newly acquired controller.  This is quite possibly the most cinematic game I have ever played.  It’s not cinematic in the sense of the cut-scenes so much but the actual gameplay itself.  The whole game is based on hiding behind objects and then reaching out and shooting out over them.  Then there’s the rodeo run, the crouched sprint with the the camera following at a low elevation behind.  The story line is really lacking, but this obviously wasn’t a focus during dev.  What ended up happening was an eight hour marathon of gaming only stopping for a short lasagna break.

We finished the whole game on hardcore difficulty in that time.  The credits rolled at about 2:30 am, way later than either of us though it was.  I haven’t played a game the whole way through in one day since the days of the Turbo Grafix 16.

In other news I finished my last university lab every today creating a few different types of digital circuits.  More importantly I finished my third last final exam ever.  I’m not going to talk about that right now.