Wow, the 12 and half day holiday break went by extremely fast. This  break went by a lot faster than my previous long holiday breaks the previous years. Normally, I am bored as all get out but I seemed to only accomplish half of the things I had planned for this break. I am still “off work” for another week since I am taking an International Business class at Wash U this week but I am keeping up with my emails with my new Blackberry.

As a warning, this is an extremely long post but I did a lot in the 12 days I was off.

Football

I watched a ton of college football this break. I think it was the combination of not having much on TV during the day plus I just love sports in HD.

The MU – Northwestern game was an utter disaster even though Mizzou won. This game should have never been close. I am not sure what happened to Chase Daniel. It seems that he had a Brad Lidge / Rick Ankiel moment in the OK State game. He never looked the same since that game. Like all the other games, he was making horrible decisions and throwing the ball randomly into coverage and not making the finesse passes we are use to. I really doubt he will make it in the NFL. I had an argument with someone at school today that thought he could make it in the NFL as a safety. I said he was crazy. He disagreed.

The Big 12 does not look at strong as it appeared in the season due to a Texas Tech and Oklahoma St loss plus the near loss by Mizzou. I don’t know what to say because I really thought we were the best conference in NCAA. It does look like Texas is turning it up on Ohio State which is making me feel a little better.

Nightlife

I did not go out as much as I expected. Amazingly enough, not very many people were off any of the days I was so we only ended up going out on Friday and Saturdays.

I went to a variety of bars which are in our normal rotation. They were Bar Louie (CWE), Lure, Lucas Park, Rue 13, and Pepper Lounge. The two nights that stand out are Bar Louie and Lucas Park. Bar Louie has really become a hot spot in the last year. I remember when I lived in the CWE that the place would really thin out around 11 but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I also really want to work Lucas Park in the rotation more. There are just so many attractive girls in that place.

I did go to my first SOCO bar in  a long time. I went to House of Rock because my cousin’s husband’s band was playing there. The band was Disturbing the Peace who I actually saw open for the Urge quite a lot back in the day. It was a reunion concert since the band hadn’t played in forever. The show was good and the place was packed. I know an owner through another friend and he said this was the most packed he had ever seen the place. It was nice hanging out with my brother along with other friends. I did run into people I went to high school with which is not a normal occurrence in city bars.

Gaming

I got Gear of War 2 for Xbox 360 for Christmas. It did not disappoint. I beat the co-op in Gear of War 1, but never played it online. I started to play the campaign first on my new game before trying the online play. I at first, was a little hesitant but I eventually fell in love. I beat the game after about 10 days of play. Over Christmas, my much younger cousins kept talking about playing in Horde matches. I had no clue what they were talking about. I was surprised to find it was a pretty awesome online match wear you play waves of computer enemies on a team of 5 online players. I played this a ton with my cousins and other online friends. I got to wave 17 out of 50. We normally get to about 7 before the whole team dies so I have no clue how people get to 50. My only complaint is that you sometime lose your connection so teammates get dropped which really hurts your chances of making it past the 10th wave.

I also played a lot of Rock Band 2 for our normal pre and post drinking activities. I downloaded a good number of tracks too. My favorite being a lot of the Nirvana tracks from Nevermind.

Family Life

My moms sister was in town so I spent a lot of time with the family this break. I did the usual Christmas Eve and New Years day get together at my Dad’s parents. I had a Christmas dinner along with a good Italian dinner with my mom’s side. It is always fun to catch up with the fam and eat good food.

New Years Eve

Mike, Ted, Dave and I went to the Pepper Lounge for NYE. I did not go there last year, but did go there the two previous years. It was always a fun time. It did not disappoint this year either. I think this was the best yet. We have been going to Pepper Lounge lately and there has been a very good crowd; similar to the crowd 3 years ago. This same crowd was there this time. Almost everyone was dressed  very well. Guys in suits and dress pants and girls in dresses. I had a lot of fun and all my friends were successful in meeting girls. My cousin Mark was also there with his girlfriend.

Movies

All the summer releases were out so I spent some serious time catching up on my Netflix movie watching. Below are my reviews.

Wall-E – All my friends told me how great of a movie this was. I went into this movie expecting it to be great since my friend’s reviews plus my love of animated movies. I did not like it at all. It was basically a bad love movie. It had very minimal funny scenes and was not worth me seeing.

Hancock – I supposedly have a “man crush” on Will Smith. I have liked Will ever since Fresh Prince and have always been fond of his movies. This movie did entertain me but was one of Will’s poorer flicks.

Chronicles of Narnia – Prince Caspian – I hated this movie. I guess I did not remember what happened in the first movie so I was a little confused with the storyline. As some of my friends made fun of me, I also was distracted by deciding if the Susan character was attractive. She is over 18 so don’t judge me. I am still undecided.

Gym  and Workout Life

I worked out more in the 2 and half weeks than I probably did the entire year. It felt great. I had motivation from all angles. The highest being the mere fact that I weigh more  than I ever have but my main excuse for not working out was time (the last year of school was pretty tough) so I couldn’t use time as an excuse. I worked out at least every day during the break; sometimes twice a day. I have been taking a whey protein / creatine mixture from Walmart that seems to be pretty good since I think I have seen pretty good gains in a short time. It also seems like I have entered in a “weight loss” challenge with Mike and Dave in preparation for a possible “spring break” trip. We will see how it goes.

I concluded my break with a good touch football game with the boys in Forest Park. It was a lot of fun and I was in much better shape than our game a month ago. I had our teams first TD plus had a nice interception (something Matt Smith can not claim). I supposedly was too rough though. My friends say they are going to take Gear of War away from me since they say I have “roid” rage. I think it is the ton of energy I have lately from working out so much.

Random Stuff

• My Moxi DVR through Charter died on me. I got the new DVR and am not pleased. The Charter installer told me that I could still use my external hard drive as a secondary storage device. He was mistaken which sucks. I liked  not having to ever delete recordings since I had a 500 GB harddrive.
• I did buy three new fish. I bought a “Pimp Juice” replacement. I also had to buy a new filter since one of mine was on its last leg. My new fish are very aggressive so I am pretty happy. I was worried that my much larger lone fish would eat the fish but the three tiny fish really mess with the large fish. And one last note, inflation has really hit the fish market. These fish were outrageously expensive.
• I am not going to dedicate a whole post (like other people … Matt Smith) but I did spend a couple hours washing my car. It was the first time I had washed and cleaned the inside in over a year. Car washing has always been relaxing for me but was hard to do since there is not a close car wash nor did I have the time. I really love my car. It looks amazing after a good cleaning. The idea of getting a new Nissan 370z has crossed my mind. The subtle changes they made in the body made a big difference in my mind even though my friends disagree. It has a Porsche look even though I do not like Porsche brand. The 330 HP is also really attractive but I plan on keeping my car for another year. I do have an outrageous grad school bill that I am going to have to start paying for this year.
• On last note, I started the first day of my last semester of grad school at Wash U. I am so excited to finish. The one casualty is that I am going to miss Mardi Gras weekend since my capstone class goes all day that Saturday. That is quite disappointing since it is one of my most favorite days of the year in St Louis.

I woke up a little early to get a quick view of the new xbox dashboard. I felt like I was a kid waking up Christmas morning. I booted up the 360 and it had the old update box popup. It download a 30 second update and restarted. I then had a new update screen that was doing the main update. This only took a 1 minute or so. I was surprised by that. Maybe its my 10MB connection.

The first thing it had me do was pick an avatar. Once I picked one, I got to edit him like I wanted. Mine is pretty cool. He is sporting a sweet mustache, a faux hawk, and a white suit. I wanted white shoes but unfortunately it only offered two shoe. This is a cooler feature than I expected but I hope they incorporate cloths and accessories from other games. I am specifically thinking about your closet from Rock Band.

I did some more exploring but I kept getting “can not connect to xbox.com.” I assume this is because the tens of thousands people are doing the same thing. I next tried to activate my Neflix device. I went to the Netflix page and it said the add a new device feature was temporarily disabled … try back in two hours. I guess they got a little overloaded.

I do like the blades features. I do have some questions though:

1. Why can you not preview the Rock Band downloadable tracks before you buy one?
2. All of my friends had some random object in the background of their blade. Can you change these? My brother had guitars and a drum set. He does not have Rock Band or Guitar Hero so I thought that was weird.
3. Will the streaming music and video feature work correctly on this version? I had to use Tiversity because I could never get it to work.

I have class the next two nights so I expect to give a full review over the weekend.

UPDATE #1 – Read this on Engadget. I think Sony is taking a sad route. I would have thought that Netflix would have protected this from happening but maybe not.

Harmonix finally announced the 20 free additional songs that will be available to everyone who bought Rock Band 2. I saw a list a couple weeks ago that was all big name bands so I am greatly disappointed with this list since I don’t know a single band. These songs will be available on November 20th.

• The 88 – “Sons and Daughters”
• Authority Zero – “No Regrets”
• Between the Buried and Me – “Prequel To The Sequel”
• The Cab – “Bounce”
• The Chevelles – “Get It On”
• The Cocktail Slippers – “Give It To Me”
• Dealership – “Database Corrupted”
• Endeverafter – “I Wanna Be Your Man”
• The Ghost Hounds – “Ashes To Fire”
• Hollywood Undead – “Young”
• Kutless – “The Feeling”
• The Len Price 3 – “If I Ain’t Got You”
• Lesley Roy – “I’m Gone, I’m Going”
• Opiate for the Masses – “Burn You Down”
• Semi-Precious Weapons – “Magnetic Baby”
• Shaimus – “Like a Fool”
• Thenewno2″ – Crazy Tuesday”
• Tickle Me Pink – “The Time Is Wrong”
• Underoath – “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
• X Japan – “I.V.”

This post is for the Rengler. Supposedly, Nintendo announced today that they are going to release a Punch Out for the Wii in 2009. Is this the game that will push you over the edge to finally buy a new generation gaming counsel? You can still get Madden and Guitar Hero/Rock Band for Wii too. I think you played the original Mike Tyson for over a year during your big flash game kick while we lived at Waterman. I think we all know the story of you and your friends playing this game nonstop on Nintendo when it originally came out. What do you think?

I absolutely love the new Rock Band 2. I have been reading a lot of bad reviews with the most complaints in the category that they didn’t change much. The other complaint I hear is that the vocals are way too easy to get 100% on expert. I think people are totally off base for the following reasons (1) the game is supposed to be fun and can almost be seen like an expansion pack. It is surely cheaper than buying 80 songs through the marketplace (2) they did make changes that I really like. The most notable change is the ability to play World Tour with only 1 person. I really enjoyed World Tour mode in the original but rarely had people over enough to get far in it. (3) I like that you now can see the song difficulty when choosing a track in quick play. (4) this release has better online play and abilities. You can have a World Tour with one of your friends online and you can more easily challenge a fellow online gamers plus you can try out daily challenges that Harmonix posts … very similar to what EA did with Tigers Woods 2008. (5) I found the vocals to be hard on medium and I sang throughout all of high school. I think making it easier wouldn’t hurt but not as easy as people are depicting which I actually don’t believe. I will check this out at a later time (6) Last but not least, they greatly improved on what people are calling “party” features. These features include quicker and easier navigation to get the band setup plus enabled an option to make it so that the band can not fail. I think all of these options are huge. I didn’t even mention the fact that you could copy all the Rock Band 1 song over and play them in Rock Band 2 which is worth the game in itself.

My only complaint is that they did not add a counter for your successful notes streak. Guitar Hero has it and I think it is a good feature.

Overall, I think the game kicks ass. I really am enjoying the songs that are on this album. Harmonix did a great job securing these artist. I can’t wait to get the Foo Fighter and Red Hot Chili Peppers albums when they come out. Also, people are acting like the original game was bad but it wasn’t even close. It served its purpose of being a fun game. I don’t think you need to add all these other bells and whistles like avatars and character appearances. People are there to play the songs on the game. So all Harmonix needs to do is improve the gameplay and come out with more songs. They did this and it is greatly appreciated.

P.S. I had no clue there was a code to unlock all the songs in Rock Band 1. From what I saw in other articles, the code in Rock Band 1 had to be entered every time the game started. Rock Band 2 remember the codes for this people that do not want to go through the World Tour part. For me, I would rather go through the process. I already have about 50 songs unlocked … I am mega star.