I've been off for vacation for a little while, and today I went in for my first day of the new year.  I had been suspicious about whether today was one of the official holidays on the calendar, but I went in anyway.  Hardly anyone was there, and I related my suspicions to my boss, who went and got a new 2005 calendar and confirmed that it was indeed a holiday.  So, we went home.

Luckily, I won't have to spend time tomorrow catching up on my email and such since I did it all this morning.

We spent the day in Belton today with my folks and my brother.  We had a good time winding up the holiday festivities.  Mom made her patented roast, which she will tell you is nothing special, but it's really yummy.

Dave got an XBox communicator, and when Becky and I got back from Belton, I had about 5 hilarious XBox Live voice messages from him. We played several games of Halo 2 “Big Team Battle”.  I think you probably have to experience it to truly understand how fun it is, but it's an 8-on-8 team battle playing different kinds of capture-the-flag-esque games in huge environments with all kinds of flying, rolling, and hovering vehicles; lots of guns and grenades; and in-game voice hilarity.  The funnest moment for me was jumping in a Warthog (a humvee-type vehicle), waiting for Dave and another guy to jump in the passenger and gunner seats, and then taking off across the battlefield at full speed to pick up the bomb and singing pirate chanties along the way.  It was great.

I just checked my CallVantage account management page and found they had added alot of features! Most for free! One premium feature, which I don't mind spending an extra couple of bucks a month for is call filtering.  Now I can completely block those dang Austin American Statesman and SBC calls.

I just played my first online Halo 2 game.  WICKED AWESOME!!!  Check out my stats for the game. The medals are interesting. I'm also pretty proud of my hits. The game viewer is awesome although I can't seem to make a link for it since it opens via some javascript. At least I didn't lose.

If anyone's interested, here's my Halo 2 games RSS feed.

I'm gonna jump on and play some more!

We had a great time today with Becky's family. I finally got Halo 2 and have been playing the campaign mode since I can't get online yet.  It's by leaps and bounds the most beatiful console game I've ever seen.  All the cinematic sequences appear to be rendered in real-time and look as good as pre-rendered sequences.  Very impressive.

Becky and I have spent the last few days here in El Paso for some of our Christmas vacation.  I took some time to clean my father-in-law's pc from the many viruses and spyware programs that were grinding it to a halt.  It only had 64MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 384 using some old RAM that I happened to have in one of my bags. In the process of cleaning, I upgraded his AOL software to the 9.0 “security edition“ which comes with anti-spyware and anti-virus software, which was actually pretty nice.

Anyway, it's working great now and we're having a great time. I always realize how much I miss broadband when I'm here. Just googling something is such a huge ordeal. It snowed quite a bit yesterday evening, but the ground's still pretty warm so it's almost all gone now.

After tomorrow, I'm off for the rest of the year.  I'll likely be playing my fair share of video games.  I'd like to increase my XBox Live friends list so I can play online and actually feel some connection to the people I'm playing with.  So:

• Who's got XBox Live and what's your gamertag? Mine is, appropriately, “marklio” (I know it's lame, but I like consistency).  Feel free to leave yours here, or just send me a friend invitation (they really should have called that “friendvitation“).
• What are you playing? I should have Halo 2 by Christmas, but I'm looking for other cool online games.  I rented Star Wars Battlefront, which is pretty fun.

I've been using the MSN Desktop Search (I'll refer to it as that since I have no use for the rest of the toolbar suite and immediately turned it off) for the past few days and it is good enough to make me uninstall Google Desktop Search.  The fact that it, by default, indexes source code, xml and anything I can write an IFilter for was enough for me.  I also like the search as you type.  Very well done.

The only problem I have is it seems to conflict with WindowBlinds, software that lets me load thousands of visual themes for windows.  I have to unload WindowBlinds, search for something, and load it back up again.  Then everything works fine.  I suspect it has to do with the order that applications register hooks (which has caused problems like this before).

I picked up the component cables for the XBox last night (they're different than the ones in that link.  It looks more like the Monster Cable version).  I must say, they are the highest quality first party component cables for a video game system I've ever seen.  They also add the digital optical audio output.  For only $20, there's no need to waste a colossal amount of money on the Monster Cable ones. 

There's nothing like shooting Jar-Jar Binks with a sniper rifle in HD widescreen 5.1 Dolby Digital goodness.

I've also updated my holiday wishlist accordingly.

[UPDATE:12/16/2004]  I took the box over to Dave's last night where we romped on Jar Jar for a couple of hours.  He's got a direct view CRT which is inherently sharper than my rear projection CRT and it is definitely quite beautiful.  Can't wait to get Halo 2.

Today is the birthday of my good friend Jason Owens. Happy Birthday!  This is a picture from last Christmas. I miss the old birthdays where we'd all go spend the night at your house and play slaughterball and watch The Three Amigos.

Happy Birthday!