OH...did I mention?

Feast your eyes on my latest toy. Yes, it's the MGS4 bundle, and yes it's all mine!!! Yes I have beat the game, and yes it was awesome!

I'll have to write a little about switching platforms. Back about 5 years ago I bought an Xbox mainly because of the whole Halo craze, and for the most part I loved it. Great multiplayer games, easy to use, and easily "modded" (thanks Justin!) When Xbox360 was released I was extremely close to buying one but couldn't fine one to be bought. My desire waned, and eventually turned to a slight bit of relief after I heard of the horrible problems with the first generation models. Then Sony released the PS3, and I'll have to admit, I balked when it first came out. I guess I was just against it because I had always been an Xbox type of guy and I didn't want to give it a chance, but after we bought an HDTV last year I've had the itch for a Blu-Ray player and I just couldn't pass this sweet baby up when my mother-in-law gave us $500 smackaroos to spend on "something fun". This was 3 weeks ago and I haven't looked back. I'll have to say, switching gaming platforms is very similar to switching policital parties. Some people really don't care, and enjoy the best of both worlds, some people welcome you with open arms, and others talk to you like you're crazy and couldn't imagine uprooting your loyalties and giving your money to a company like SONY...like it's worse than giving money to Microsoft???

I don't care...I love it!

I call it "scheduled" procrastination

In the spirit of procrastination, I'm sitting here at my computer at nearly 11 p.m. with a test looming at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning but I'm doing everything but studying. Instead I'm going to entertain you for a bit and throw together a compilation of some of the PhotoBooth pics I've taken on my computer since somewhere around late last year. Hope you enjoy them, and if you're viewing this between 8 and 9 tomorrow morning please be thinking of me.

Back to the "Real" World

After a week of riding my bicycle through the wilderness of the Great Allegheny Passage and the historic C&O Canal trail it's kind of weird to come back to the "real" world. The funny thing to me, is the 335 miles my cyclocomputer clocked over 6 days seemed pretty "real" to me. I saw things over the past week that I honestly didn't thing I would ever see, nor did I even know exist. I saw towns where battles that shaped our country were fought, I saw one of the biggest wonders of the modern world, I saw some of the most beautiful areas in the country, and I saw the nation's capital with my own two eyes. Now I'm trying to swallow the idea of driving back to Springfield and going back to work and school. Sometimes there just isn't enough time to soak it all in.

**Update, if you would like to see some more pics of the trip you can go here.

Panoramas

Here's a few panorama shots I took on our trip out west in early June. I'm not sure what to do with them, so I thought I'd share them, enjoy.

Snake River - Grand Teton NP

Many Glacier - Glacier NP

Little Missour River - Theodore Roosevelt NP

Theodore Roosevelt NP

Waterton Lakes National Park - Alberta Canada