It almost 4am and I am about to roll into bed. It's a good thing I'm not waking up until noon tomorrow because I am tee-eye-erd. I got home just before 2am after taking a cab on EA's dime. My cab driver told me he currently has a daughter traveling through in India at the moment. She's in the city of Mumbai right now. She's ok but you can chalk this one up to some bad timing.

After I got home, I decided to eat an entire plate of thinly sliced salami. It was damn tasty. I chased it down with a holiday-themed Rice Krispy square. It had red and green kernels in it. So now I will get into my teddy bear jammies and go to sleep.

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Today EA issued a press release on when skate 2 will be at stores. For those living in North America, you can buy it on January 21. The rest of the world will have to wait two more days. If I may and I believe I can, since this is my blog, I would like to mention I'd really appreciate it if you could purchase a copy of skate 2 when it comes out. I put a lot of work into it and it has some very cool features that would enhance your life enjoyment. Even if you don't play video games, consider a purchase. The thickness of the game's case is perfect for those pesky unbalanced table legs. At the very least, please tell your friends about the game.

In related news, I was told today by my manager not to come into work until 2pm until further notice. As we're finishing up, we're trying to get as much coverage during the day and evening as possible. That means we'd like a software engineer in our area to be present for as much of the 24 hours as possible. I'll start at 2pm and be there until 10pm. I'm quite happy about that since I'm hard-wired night owl. Sure, I don't have my evenings free but since I've worked so much OT now, I'm not sure how many friends I have left anyways. I'm actually quite pleased about being able to sleep in now.

Unfortunately, this won't last beyond two weeks as I'm sorta penciled in to start my holidays at the beginning of December. Until then, it's time for some sleep.

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In 1999, I spent just over $100 to buy a DVD drive for my computer. It was one of the most exciting pieces of computer equipment that I had ever bought. Before coming home with it, I went to the video store and rented one of them new-fangled "dee-vee-dees". I chose Pixar's A Bug's Life, the first movie to ever have been completely digitally transfered to the home video medium. At the time, my computer monitor was 4:3 CRT measuring just 15" diagonally. Gosh darn it though, when that Disney logo came up, I thought I had the coolest thing ever. Though it was only a resolution of 720 x 480, I was in awe of those CGI bugs on the screen. The picture seems so sharp and so flawless. It was then I decided I could never go back to VHS.

Fast forward to almost ten years from then, last Friday actually. I brought home a Blu-ray drive for my computer. Also with me was a copy of Pixar's Wall-E on Blu-ray disc. It took a bit of tweaking but I finally installed the BD drive. This time around my monitor is a widescreen LCD at 24", with a resolution of 1920 x 1200. When I saw little Wall-E compacting that trash on my monitor, I was again in awe. It takes a ton of processing horsepower but it's all worth it for that glorious 1080p picture. HD movies are simply stunning. Mind you, the source material for Wall-E is also digital, so the picture is especially conducive to looking pretty. I could see every little scratch and dent on Wall-E and every reflection coming off Eve. Sure there's a lot of hype around HD but when it works, it's simply amazing. I'm just watching it on a piddly 24" monitor, I can just imagine what it looks like on a 42" LCD TV.

Much like Jerry Seinfeld and first class, I can't go back to DVD! I won't!

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This weekend, the teenage vampire/romance film Twilight was the number one movie at the box office. The movie is based off the Twilight series of books from author Stephenie Meyer. Up until perhaps a month ago, I didn't even know these books nor the film existed. Nor did I realize until then how popular the series was with young adults. Anyways, I have since found out the fans of the books are quite enthusiastic about the fiction.

Now stick with me here because this might sound a little bit strange. A few months ago, I wrote one of my much acclaimed "Brush with Greatness" series of posts. This particular post dealt with a young lady I know who auditioned for the CBS reality show Amazing Race and was chosen to be on the show but had to bow out unfortunately. "Gen" is a pretty cool individual, so it wasn't difficult to see how she was able to impress the folks at CBS.

It turns out "Gen" is also famous for another thing and she's never really mentioned this to most people in her life. "Gen" used to be an assistant at a literary agency in NYC. She was the one that read Stephenie Meyers' original submission and deemed it good enough for more consideration. The rest, as they say, is best-selling history. If you go to Ms. Meyers' web site, she credits "Gen" for her big break into the world of publishing.

Since the movie has come out, "Gen" has been inundated with dozens of friend requests on Facebook from Twilight fans. You can probably find her full name out there and the fans have been trying to somehow get closer to the world of Twilight. I believe she's politely declined all of the requests but interesting to see how pop culture works like that.

A double dose of greatness from "Gen"!

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