marchawkins.com

Finally got a chance to try out the new multiplayer (massive?) first-person shooter, MAG. Initial impressions are pretty good, but I really only went through the tutorial and played a couple Suppression (ie. deathmatch) rounds.

There are definitely some Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 similarities, with custom loadouts, experience, leveling up to unlock weapons and gear, etc. The experience leveling is a little more involved, allowing you to spend experience ‘points’ to upgrade physical skills (sprint time, stealth, etc.), weapons (attachments, faster reloads), armor, field skills (faster repair, better healing of you and/or teammates). There are also some fairly basic appearance options for your character, including armor design, headgear, and couple other things I haven’t unlocked.

After the tutorial stage, you start progressively unlocking various match types such as suppression, sabotage and others. The bulk of the game (which I haven’t gotten to yet) is the “Shadow War” – a persistent war that players (up to 256) can drop into.

One of the features I enjoyed the most was just joining a match. You select your match type and are immediately put into a queue (I never had to wait longer than 20-30 sec. to join a match). This was refreshing compared to CoD MW2’s party system and lobbies where I feel like it takes me 10 minutes to finally get into a group of players and start a match. Granted, I wasn’t playing MAG with any friends, so I can’t speak as to how that part of the game plays out yet.

Anyway, there’s no way I can really give an opinion of the game until I get into, but right now I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far. The controls are solid, graphics are decent – not quite as polished as CoD 4 MW2, but that’s easily overlooked in a firefight with 30+ players. More info as I get into the game a little more.

• Forgotten backpack has been delivered to preschool. All is right in the world once more. #
• Where's my new Rob Zombie album? #
• Get ready for greatness, Lloyd. #
• Hello Tuesday. Monday smacked me in the face and split – what shall you hold? #
• Really annoyed at people who read the first sentence of an email and insist on a phone call instead of hitting 'reply'. wtf. #
• You do not talk. You do not move from these sits. And you, you may not sleep. #
• I seem like the only person I know who doesn't give two shits about the last season of Lost. #
• Shoveled out. Again. #
• One hour and 45minute preschool with no lunch. What's the point, really? I spent an hour in the car just driving back and forth. #
• 125 minute conference call today. Sweet. #
• Really not sure I can take another Saturday being snowed in. #
• Still get excited when I'm on a foreign wifi network. Sad. #
• Two kids at dance diagnosed with head lice. Now my head won't stop itching. Shoot me. #
• wow – i love the new facebook layout. best yet, in my opinion. well done. #
• flickr: IMG_0212: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/a1ZZ8e #
• flickr: IMG_0239: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/aNej2u #
• flickr: IMG_0234: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/bO60Dk #
• flickr: IMG_0232: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/c7RGEj #
• Hoping the storm pushes a little farther south. 12+ inches of snow is the shits. #
• Watching the punks get off the bus. Wishing I could go play xBox all afternoon. #
• Well this sucks. #
• First half hour of shoveling was invigorating. The next 3, not so much. PA blows. #
• I would really like to stick my foot up the snow plow operator's ass. #
• flickr: IMG_0253: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/ctcetQ #
• flickr: IMG_0252: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/bqRgzc #
• flickr: IMG_0251: marchawkins posted a photo:
  http://bit.ly/9CdAtH #

As a card-carrying member of the Apple faithful, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve chugged my fair share of the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid. iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPhone – I’ve got ‘em all. So after waiting with the rest of the world for the unveiling of Apple’s tablet, for the first time in a long while I was left unimpressed with the latest Apple offering: iPad. Long story short – I’ve already got an iPhone that will seemingly run almost exactly the same apps as the iPad. Meaning I can’t do any real work on it other than email and web surfing.

So, a couple of days after the iPad announcement I headed to Best Buy and picked up an Asus Eee PC Netbook. It was $299 (quite a bit less with gift cards and reward certificates). Quick rundown of the specs:

• 1.6Ghz Intel Atom
• 1 GB RAM (which I upgraded to 2G)
• 160GB hard drive
• 10.1″ widescreen display

It came with Windows 7 Starter (complete with 3 simultaneous app limit and inability to change the desktop wallpaper) which I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. It’s a pretty snappy little beast. Best feature I’ve found is the insane battery life. I’ve can surf the web with a few odds and ends (IM, etc.) for 3 or 4 hours and still have 30% battery left. Pretty crazy. Anyway, here are a couple pics (from Best Buy).

In the meantime, I’ll be surfing the interwebs on this bad boy until the next Apple announcement…

Last week brought to a close a 6-issue (originally planned for 5) mini-series from Marvel Comics, Captain America: Reborn. The series chronicles the aftermath of the death of Steve Rogers and the events surrounding Captain America #600. I won’t go into the details of the story here, but the mainstream press coverage of The Death of Captain America piqued my interest and got me back into collecting comics. I probably wouldn’t consider myself a true collector per se, as I’m just slowly picking up mini-series that I like. Anyway, I grabbed the camera and snapped some shots of the all covers I was able to get. Most issues included several variant, limited-edition covers by other artists. I was fortunate to pick up most of them, but I think I’m missing three, so that’ll give me a something to search for as I poke around local comic shops. The photos aren’t that great because of the flash, but there is definitely some cool artwork in here. Enjoy.

One interesting thing, issues 1-4 all say “# of 5″ and then issue 5 says “5 of 6″. I guess the writers didn’t know they were going to 6 issues until they were at issue #5. Seems kind of weird, but a neat tidbit when looking at the collection as a whole.

Trying out a post from the iPhone. Obviously not an ideal platform for composing long posts, but handy to have the capability nonetheless. Couldn’t connect the app to my blog a couple of months ago, but it seems to be working now. Hooray for progress.

Once again, I’ve decided to install WordPress as the de facto CMS for this website. I’ve set it up on a number of sites recently and am really enjoying the advancements in the admin interface over the past couple of versions. I’ve also just signed up for a posterous account, so I’ve got some planning to do as far as how these two services can interact (integrate?).

Surprisingly, this latest version also seems to be running a little faster than the last couple releases. That could just be my imagination. I still can’t tell if I’ve f’d up my server by mucking around with php.ini files and such. Time will tell, I guess.