I am a Japanese School Teacher

If you only read a few, make sure you read "Gaijin Smash". Hilarity.

Another one of these book meme things. This one is slightly different from the last one, so I guess I'll go ahead and do it too.

A) Total number of books I've owned: Like Chuck, I have absolutely no idea. The number is large, but not that large. Most of my books are given away after I've read them since I don't have much use for them unless they are educational. I have a small bookshelf full of educational books.

B) The last book I bought: Well, since I never kept my books, I decided to stop buying them and utilize the wonderful public library here in Fayetteville. The last book I bought was a Haynes manual for my motorcycle.

C) The last book I read: Well, I'm currently reading a number of books:

• The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King
• Zombies in My Hometown by Gary Wedlund and The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks. These are both "e-books", so I'm not sure if they count.
• Habitat for Humanity, how to build a house by Larry Haun.

The last book that I completed (i.e. not currently reading) was The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah by Stephen King.

D) 5 books that mean a lot to me:

• The Shining by Stephen King
• Weaveworld by Clive Barker
• Imagica by Clive Barker
• Naked by David Sedaris
• The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer.

E) Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their blog:
Angie
Charlie
Julie
Will
Brad

Searcy parks offer wireless Internet service

Searcy, a city of close to 20,000, has joined the ranks of much larger U.S. cities — including the largest, New York — that are providing wireless Internet in city parks. The White County seat is the first town in Arkansas to offer this service, city officials say. "It works great, too. It’s pretty fast," Castor said.

This is awesome. Hopefully Fayetteville will follow the trend (or get with the program.) I'm kind of surprised that the city funded it though. In other cities, it's been rich philanthropists who've been the founders of these programs. Lord knows there are enough rich people in Fayetteville. Maybe one of them will step up to the plate now that little 'ol Searcy is making them look bad.

Being serious all the time is no fun and probably bad for your health. I spend a good part of my day at work reading the news and various "serious" blogs. Sometimes I find that I've had enough and I'm feeling stressed out. When that happens, I make the rounds to my favorite comedy blogs and web comics. I figure most of you could probably use some stress relief, so I'm going to list a few of my favorites here. If you know of more, I'd love to hear about them. I'm always looking for some good comedy. Ahh, I guess I should say that these links can possibly contain adult humor. Not always, but sometimes. Just so you know. Most of them should be work safe though, unless your work prohibits comics or something.

The Blogs

• Defective Yeti
• The Sneeze
• Cockeyed.com
• Waiter Rant

The 'toons

• Penny Arcade
• PVP Online
• The Order of the Stick I think this is probably my favorite of the bunch. Start at the beginning to get the whole story.
• Alien Loves Predator
• VG Cats
• Achewood

I actually read a lot more web comics than that, but they are pretty obscure and not always funny. I tried to stick to the ones that are more consitantly funny on this list.

So what are your favorites? Post 'em up in the comments and I'll check them out.

I promised some more scenery from Guild Wars, so here it is. All of this stuff is from the Post-Searing world. Pre-Searing is much more lush, but the "real" game takes place after the Searing.

Click for full size.

So, these are all of my character (I'm so vain,) so there's not much in the way of scenery. I'll try to get some better ones tonight.

Click for full size.

So, I couldn't resist an MMO with no monthly fee. I went out and sold my Nintendo DS and bought Guild Wars with the proceeds. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I've got about 10 hours of play on my character now, and he's already level 8.

Some things I really like about the game:

• No monthly fee. I think I already mentioned that, but I believe that's my favorite part. I like MMO's, and I've played a couple of them during their beta phases, but I've never been able to bring myself to pay the monthly fee.
• Amazing graphics. I'll post some screenshots here in a few minutes. They really don't do it justice though. In the shots, you can see all the polygon edges, but in the game, it's very smooth. I've got everything turned up except for the antialiasing which I've got set to 2x. This game is beautiful.
• The ability to do a quest with AI controlled henchmen instead of other player characters. Really, doing the quests with other PC's is preferable, but if you just can't get a good group together, no problem, just flesh it out with a couple of henchmen.
• The ability to multi-class. Each character gets 2 character classes to pick from. You can mix and match any of the classes and create some pretty interesting combonations.
• Once you've been to a city, you can just open your map and instantly travel to it. You have to actually find the city by running around the map first, but once you've found it, there's no reason to run to it again.
• Character and Guild customization. You have a pretty good variety of character customizations you can make as far as facial features and body style. Not as many as City of Hero's, but enough to get some individuality. Also, if you join a guild, you'll get a cape that your guild leader has spent some time designing.

Of course, it's not all roses. The game is very new, and there are a few minor things that still need to be worked out. For example:

• Sometimes the henchmen or pets get stuck on objects in game and can't move past them. That's very annoying, especially when it's your groups healer, and you don't notice until you're in a fight and she's standing 2 clicks back stuck to a fence post or something.
• Automatically travelling to a city via the map will make you leave your party. That's very inconvenient since that means that if you form a party in Ascalon City, and you have a quest in the Sarlac Sanitarium, you'll have to run there, unless of course, you've all already been there, then you can just travel there and re-form the party.
• Normally, these types of games have the ability to do command-line emotes like in IRC. For example, if I typed /me dances a jig! in EQ or WoW, the chat window would say "Scott dances a jig!" The game does have a list of emotes you can do, but they're obviously limited.

So, lots of things I like, not too many that I don't like. Over all on a scale from house cats to bearded irises, this game gets a strawberry frulatte.

Engadget

These could be completely fake, but some semi-plausible specs for the new Xbox 360, as well as some details about Xbox Live, were posted and then quickly pulled from the TeamXbox forums. The part about it having a 20GB detachable hard drive seems a little sketch, since we’d heard something about it being a 40GB drive, but the rest of it seems to make sense. You have exactly 77 hours to argue over whether or not these are for real.

Update:

Okay, so there's some stuff in there that doesn't make much sense. I'm hoping that this system will be similar to what's posted here though because, wow. It could use some more memory, but other than that, these stats are insane.

If I didn't know better, I would say that Gamespy is in Sony's pocket. Gamespy reviewed Guild Wars, a new MMORPG without the traditional monthly subscription fee.

Before I get too deep into this, I would like to say that I do not actually own this game, however my best friend, who is one of the most discerning gamers in the world, has filled me in on the relevant aspects.

In Gamespy's review, if you didn't know anything about the game, you would think that Guild Wars is an online clone of Diablo. In one section, the reviewer says

If you're familiar with Diablo-style action RPGs, then you'll know what to expect. When you see an enemy on the field, you simply click on it, run your character to attack range, and begin to whale on it. You then click on your abilities on the screen to execute them, or activate them through hotkeys.

If you've ever played an RPG, you know that the same description could be used for pretty much any of them. The author also fails to mention that there are two control styles. One is very much like Diablo, and the other is more action oriented, 3rd person style. I would say that he can be forgiven for that omission, but he's a reviewer for the most well known game website in the world, so I say screw him. He should have known better. To say that this game is like Diablo is to completely ignore everything about the game except the one control style.

In another section, he complains about the installation media giving him disk read errors. This is pretty common for any game, but my game expert tells me he experienced no such problems. The reviewer goes on to describe how the game does it's streaming content. He talks all about how long it took him to load a level and how much of a problem this is. The thing he leaves out is that this only happens if you're playing the version that's downloaded from the games website. If you install the game from the disks (like any normal person would) this would not happen. There's really no reason to use the streaming client unless you're getting the read errors he talks about. I mean you own the game, so presumably you have the media. I am betting the reviewers disk read errors could have been resolved pretty easily too, but I can't really say since I wasn't there.

My final complaint about this review is with the screenshots presented in the article. These are the 2 worst screenshots I've ever seen for this game. Really, I've seen the game played, and seen a lot of screenshots and it's an unbelievably beautiful game. One of the most spectacular I've seen. But if you were to go by the shots posted in the article, you would not get that impression.

In conclusion, this game is nothing like Diablo. Gamespy is working for the devil. I would buy this game if I could afford it today. Thank you for your attention.

Update

Gamespot has a much better review.

It took me about 2 minutes to figure this out, but I still thought it was cool.

Why is it called 2nd day air if it takes 4 days?

Pray that you never have to do business with the Washington County Health Department. I've been trying to get one piece of paper from them for 2 weeks now, and they're telling me things like: "The guy who does the faxing is out today," and "Call this other guy in another department, and he'll get the paper for you." So I call the other guy: "I haven't recieved anything, call the main office back and make sure they've faxed it." Main office: "Oh we faxed it to him on the 28th, and we can't fax it again. If you want it faxed again, you'll have to get the inspector to fax us another copy of your paperwork." So I call the other guy back and inform him that he does indeed have my paperwork, they said so. "No I don't, but I'll call the main office myself. There's not just one guy who does the faxing."

So that's where I am right now. Waiting for the other guy to call me back and tell me that I'm screwed.

Update

After a couple of phone calls and a talk with the supervisor at the Health Department, I'm finally going to make some progress. Here's what they want me to do: 1) Get another copy of my septic inspection from the inspector 2)Hand carry it to the Health Dept. office to get it notarized by the supervisor himself 3)Hand carry it again to the Water Authority office to get it turned in.

I absolutely cannot believe the amount of crap I've had to wade through to get this done. In a day and age when we've been using digital devices to transfer information for over 20 years, I'm being forced to cart a piece of paper to 2 different offices in 2 different cities, just to get the OK. And what's the OK for? So I can pay them $1400 to put in a meter. You'd think they would want that money. They certainly don't act like it.

So, we're in the final stretch of this pregnancy thing, and it just seems like it's never going to end. My wife will be in a never ending state of late pregnancy, and we will forever be on the verge of having a baby.

Okay, I'm sure it won't be that long.

We've got the room all set up with our nifty co-sleeper. We've got seemingly hundreds of new baby clothes. Angela has made some pretty cloth baby wipes that I think she could sell on the internet if she were so inclined. She's also crocheting an afghan that is going to be awesome.

Our CNM says Angela can come off of bed rest soon. That will be fantastic. Ang is really getting tired of not being able to do anything. I'll also be glad because that means she'll be helping out with the houshold chores again.

Really, I'm just ready to get this waiting over with, and start getting to know our new daughter. I absolutely can't wait. It's going to be awesome.