I got bitten by the World of Warcraft bug. After I found out that my Alienware order has been slightly delayed due to an out-of-stock video card, I decided I wasn't going to wait around. Since I was able to play the WoW beta on my laptop, I figured the retail version would run as well. And it does! It might not look very pretty, or have high frame rates when more than 30 people are on-screen, but hey, at least I can play it until the Alienware gets here. I have a Level 8 Paladin named Jancelot on the Lothar (Eastern) server. It'd be awesome if you join up.

In other news, I just received an e-mail from PRT saying the DMAX service has been installed in my home. Having placed the order only 11 days ago, I still think about the possibility that it is all a joke. After  hearing about a lot of people having a lot of trouble having them set up DSL at their homes, I find it extremely strange that I got mine only 11 days after placing the order. Perhaps my friends at PRT did their inside job well. Or maybe it was just a stroke of sheer luck. In any case, I will sy no further until I actually receive the ADSL modem and plug it in myself.

In Jaime's workshop, we are starting the finishing stages of the Golden Hall of Edoras. It is looking great, and hopefully we will have it done soon. Last weekend, Javi, Ali and Katsu came by, along with their respective SOs to play some video games. While the guys were busy playing games featuring violence and scantily clad women, the girls were hooked to Karaoke Revolution. Nana enjoyed it so much that she wants a Playstation now just for that game. Yesterday for Thanksgiving I visited my in-laws for lunch and my parents and brother for dinner. I ate a lot. Otherwise, it was pretty much a normal day like the rest. Happy Belated Turkey Day to all!

First of all let me tell you about the Halloween Party, Medieval Style, that took place at my home on the 30th of October. Man, it was a total blast! Everybody that I've talked to tells me they had a great time, some even went as far as saying that it's the best party they've ever been to. Big words, but in my opinion, well deserved. It is definitely the best party I have ever hosted, one of the best I have ever been to, and am looking forward to the next one. I couldn't have done this without help, of course, so the credit also goes to Jaime and Tumbark. I couldn't have done it without you guys. Thanks a lot! And to my patient wife who went through with all this with only some minor complaints about it all.  Lastly, I have a bunch of pics around, so if you want 'em ask for 'em.

And now, for more big news... I finally saved up enough money to buy a decent computer. My five-year-old 500MHz PC's life is near its end. It has served its time with me well, but now it is time to move on to greener pastures, faster CPUs, bigger RAM, and mind-blowing graphic card. Behold, my newest baby, Jancelot's Area 51!!! Here are the specs:

Warranty: 1-Year AlienCare Toll-Free 24/7 Phone Support
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Desktop Enhancements: Exclusive AlienGUIse Theme Manager
Chassis: Alienware® Full-Tower Case (480-Watt PS) - Space Black
Power Supply: Alienware® 480 Watt Power Supply
Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 550 w/ HT Technology 3.4GHz 1MB Cache
Motherboard: Alienware® PCI Express Motherboard with Intel® 925X Chipset
Memory: 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz - 2 x 512MB
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 Ultra PCI Express 256MB DDR3 w/Dual Digital and TV Out
Video Cooling: AlienIce™ Video Cooling System - Astral Blue
System Drive: High Performance - Serial ATA - 120GB Seagate® Barracuda 7,200 RPM w/8MB Cache
Optical Drive One: NEC® ND-3500 16x Dual Layer DVD±R/W Recorder
Floppy Drive: 3.5" 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive - Black
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster® Audigy® 2 ZS High Definition 7.1 Surround Firewire (IEEE® 1394)
Network Connection : Integrated High Performance Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
Display One: NEC 18" LCD 1860NX MultiSync - Black
Speakers: Creative MegaWorks THX® 250D 2.1 300-Watt Speakers
Keyboard: Microsoft® Multimedia Keyboard - Space Black
Mouse: Microsoft® IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 - USB - Space Black
Alienware Exclusive Offers: Gamespot Complete - Free 90-day Trial (a $20.85 value)
Alienware Exclusive Offers: 10% off your next EB Games online purchase
Free Alienware T-Shirt: Free Alienware® T-Shirt - Black
Free Alienware Mousepad: Free Alienware® Mousepad
AlienInspection: AlienInspection - Exclusive Integration and Inspection - $99.99 Value - FREE!
AlienWiring: AlienWiring - Exclusive Internal Wire Management - $99.99 Value - FREE!

It's not as pumped up as I initially wanted it to be, since I had to reduce some of the components to less quality and cheaper ones in order to reduce the total payment. But overall I think it's a pretty good bang for my bucks. The only bad thing about Alienwares is that they take a little bit over a month to get the systems up and running and shipped to their customers. And I was informed I will be getting mine sometime in December, so it'll be a long wait... World of Warcraft will have to wait...  

But it's gonna be worth it. HELL YEAH!!

Whoa, it's been a while. Just a quick update on the hundreds of things that are going on around here... Last week we had the pleasure of having my old friend Guillermo (Neko from The Apartment) visit us. We had  lot of fun and it was great to see him again. Bill, we hope next time your stay is longer, though!

Tomorrow night we are getting together at my place to play some board games. Liza and Katsu said they're up for it, and I invited some of the PRJO folk as well. Anyone is invited, so if you like board games, let me know, since we plan to continue this with a monthy board game night deal if tomorrow's results are positive. I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun!

Jaime and I started working on a scaled model of the Golden Hall of Edoras. Well, mostly Jaime, I just help a bit here and there... Anyway, it is coming along great! Sadly, we had to put that project on hold, as we are now spending time at the workshop on the decorations and other stuff for the Halloween party. As a matter of fact, I will be heading over to the workshop tonight after work. And yes, in case you didn't get my e-mail, we are having a medieval-themed Halloween Party on the 30th at my place, and it's looking like it will be an incredibly fun and enjoyable event!

Tumbark and I are planning a new Star Wars d20 RPG campaign, where a light side team of players and a dark side team will compete and square off against each other. He will be the GM for the dark side and I will be the GM for the light side. We plan to start the sessions sometime in November. It's gonna be fun!

Oh, and I still haven't finished Tales of Symphonia. Just got to the beginning of the 2nd disc at around 62 hours... and counting! And I think my characters are higher level than Laura's were when she finished it, hehe! Yes, I like to take my time with a console RPG. The game is really neat. Well, that pretty much sums everything up. If I forgot something I guess I'll have to post again... before I let an entire month slip by.

It is freakin' cold at work!!  

This weekend I built some furniture to cover the space between the sofa and the wall in the game room. I came up with a design on paper and calculated all the measurements, bought some plywood and had it cut accordingly, and proceeded to put it together with my dad's help. I even have a battle scar on my left hand's middle finger, caused by some pliers I was using to cut nails in half because they were a bit too long. There are still three bubbles filled with clotted blood on the finger (a big one about a quarter-inch wide on top, and one medium and a tiny one below it), which are just there looking at me while I type this.   It is a bit swollen but it doesn't hurt at all, it just looks ugly. I was lucky the pliers did not rupture the skin, so hopefully it will heal soon.  

But enough about the detailed description of my wound. The furniture is a wooden desk that I plan to use for displaying my LOTR dioramas, as well as for more miscellaneous storage space. I already finished the assembly and I just need to sand it and paint it with the brown paint that matches the front wall (behind the TV) in the room. Hope it turns out well.

Speaking of dioramas, last night I finished the Warg Attack one I've been working on for the last five or six months. I think it turned out pretty nice, it is much more colorful than my previous one, and also bigger and contains more miniatures. It's been the toughest one so far, having to individually create patches of grass out of rope and blades of grass material, and paint them to look realistic. I can't believe I forgot this, but many thanks must go to my good friend Jaime Valle, who helped me a great deal to achieve this, and from whom I still learn a good trick or two at the workshop. Check out the pictures.

And last but certainly not least, Alejandro and Jessica's wedding was on Saturday, and it was a lovely wedding. Ali and Jess, I know that by now you are having a blast over there in San Fran, but I want to wish you guys the best anyway. I am sure you will have a great honeymoon, and hope to see you soon after you come back. A big hug to the both of ya!

Last Tuesday I turned 27. Feels exactly like 26: more than a quarter-century but not yet 30. Dang, aging sucks. We waited until Saturday to throw a big party at our house, and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it was raining all morning, so the pool remained cold all afternoon. So only a few brave ones dared get in, including myself of course. And we hung out, ate and drank, played some board games and Gamecube, and enjoyed the day. We even got to see Albert lose in a video game... TO A GIRL! 

I'd like to thank all who went for making the day so enjoyable for me and for the rest. Special thanks to Jaime "The Bartender" Valle, for taking care of everyone's thirst, hydration, and alcohol needs. And if you took pictures and have them around, please send them to me at jancelot at gmail dot com. Again, thank you all for your friendship, and see you at the next party!

There is a newcomer among my collection of geek toys. Thankfully, it also has many uses besides just being a toy for men who extend their childhood until their late years. It's a celphone that also tries to be a  digital camera/MP3 player/video playback device. Multiple personalitites? Maybe... but it does the job well. Behold, the Motorola V600.

Sure, the camera might not be the best in the world, and it only has 5 MB of memory for storing MP3's, but both are nice features to have. The best feature, though, is by far the Bluetooth wireless connection. With it I can download MP3 files, MIDI files, JPG/GIF files, Java games and lots of other stuff from my PC to the phone (and vice versa). The phone easily and effortlessly joins your Bluetooth wireless network before you can even say the word 'bluetooh'. And yes, the phone runs Java ME. For most of you this might be meaningless, but the fact that I can create and deploy Java applications and games for my phone kicks some serious ass!

In other news, I've been having lots of fun at the PRJO workshops with my current project - the Warg Attack Two Towers diorama. The miniatures are done, and I have been working on the terrain - creating mountains, rock formations, and grass clumps - and it's coming along nicely. I simply love doing this and learning a new thing or two every time from Jaime.  I've been taking pictures through the whole process, so expect a link to a Photo Gallery soon.

And last but not least, yesterday I finally received the Gamecube Component Cable in the mail. As expected, I did not wait too long to plug it in to my new TV and take a look at it. Only one word can describe what I saw: WOW.  There are two levels of WOWness, actually. Regular GC games look more crisp when hooked up with the Digital Video Out connection. Symphonia looks as if Kosuke Fujishima himself had drawn the characters and the game world right there on the glass of my TV screen. WOW. However, games that support the Progressive Scan mode look even better. I played Metroid Prime for a little while, and the high resolution wide-screen world looks absolutely beautiful, and it does wonders to improve the feeling that you are actually walking along those dark, dank corridors blasting aliens and getting alien goo sprayed all over your visor. DOUBLEWOW. Of course, to Nana everything just looks the same, but to a videophile junkie like me, I was in geek heaven. Now, even more than before, I just can't wait until Metroid Prime: Echoes gets here.

That's right! I am the proud owner of a Sony KV-32HS510 HDTV. I haven't been able to hook up my DVD to it with the ass-kicking component connection yet, so I haven't exploited its full capabilities. But from what I have experienced (using instead an S-Video cable) it is the sweetest-looking picture quality I've ever seen outside your friendly electronics shop.  I am in the process of buying one of those $60 (yes, ouch), gold-plated cables that will provide a fully-digital experience, and I honestly can't wait.

I am also looking into getting the Component Video Cable for my Gamecube, which unfortunately is not sold in stores and must instead be purchased directly from Nintendo. But I did hook up my game console to the TV using the S-video connector, and it looks awesome!  The 60fps games look really smooth and crisp, and I have found no noticeable blurs or other by-products of the video compression yet.

The satellite TV is the bottom of the spectrum, since the satellite signal is analog and it must be digitized (converted to a digital image) by the TV. However, it also looks pretty incredible! No more horizontal black scan lines, woo-hooo!  A digital image created from an analog signal is not perfect, though, so sometimes if you look from very close, especially when the moving image is made small when you enter the satellite Guide, you can see some pixelated images, resulting from the TV literally having to "zoom in" on the picture to expand the puny analog NTSC image to a sweet resolution of 1080 pixels high. I considered jumping to HD satellite TV with Dish Network, but did not find it worth it, since as of now only about five or six channels actually transmit in HD, and most of them do not interest me. Expect a change in this pretty soon, though, and you can be sure I will make the jump to Digital TV in the near future.

So far I am very happy with the purchase, and look forward to putting the capabilities of the TV to good use as the world moves into the Digital Age.

Three straight days. 8 am to 7 pm. An hour off for lunch break. Two people. Sixty man-hours total. Wow.

Not even in my adolescence have my wrists hurt so much. And my fingers. And my arms. And shoulders. And back. And knees. The list goes on. This is probably the hardest labor I have done in my life so far. The wooden roof on my terrace had a couple of leaks, so I called up my dad and asked for his help to redo the roof covering. We unleashed an animal that was almost out of our capabilities to tame. The previous owners of our house were terribly lazy. Apparently, every time they had a leak on that roof, they decided to just place another layer of water-repelling roofing stuff on top of the existing one.  So, when we bought the house it already had four: one layer of some kind of ugly foam, two layers of the carton de techar stuff, and one layer of pure asphalt. All of it was held together with asphalt, and hammered straight to the wood with an insane amount of nails. And we had to remove all of it before placing a new layer, which is the correct way to do this.

By Monday afternoon, the third day, we were still removing old stuff, so we decided that we really needed to stop removing stuff and start placing the new stuff. So, leaving some of the old stuff behind, we proceeded to place the new layer. It didn't come out perfect, because of some bits of the old stuff we had to leave in place, but it looks good. And so far, the leaks are gone. We'll see how it holds up.

So we finished at almost 8 pm, and after removing asphalt from 25% of my body, I jumped in the pool. As I floated there in the water, my body felt like it was made out of Jell-O.  I was exhausted. And even after a good rest last night, I still feel tired. Never in my life had I drank so much water without feeling the need to urinate. I sweated that much. The sun is nice, but sometimes it can be a bastard. My skin is burnt in some places, especially in my arms, which are so red they look like those of a freakin' Indian. People at work think I had a nice weekend at the beach. How far away from the truth they are . 

Oh, and a piece of advise: hot asphalt is hot. It will burn your butt if you sit on it.

Yup. I am scared. On July 1st I will be making my first mortgage payment. Ouch. It's going to hurt, but hopefully it's all worth it. We simply love the new place, and find ourselves creating, changing, and modifying stuff around to suit our tastes and make it a better and nicer-looking place. Just like you do in games like Harvest Moon and The Sims, only it's for real (including the monetary costs).

This last weekend was the PRJO camping. I still feel tired from it, and I had a hard time getting up this morning to go to work. But, even though only five people went (including myself), we had a nice time. We were able to get a fire going for a couple of hours and roast some marshmallows. My hair still smells like smoke after washing it twice. Tumba snores like a bear and Jaime like a little girl. That about sums it up.

I've been playing the Warcraft 3 expansion (and will continue to do so until I get a new gam1ng-r0xx0r1ng machine), and I like it a lot. The story is nice and the missions are very creative. Strangely enough, I have reached the conclusion that demons are not evil, they are just misunderstood. I can't wait until World of Warcraft gets here.

Whoa! Nothing can stand in the way of a pressure washer. Those things are awesome!

Yesterday afternoon we cleaned the patio area around the pool. It was a lot of time-consuming work, but it was worth it. Now the concrete in the patio looks white instead of brown. We started a bit after 1 pm and finished almost at 8 pm... and we were using two washers simultaneously! Many thanks to Ali for lending me the machines and for coming over to help.  

And of course, there was no better way to relax after all the hard work than taking a dip in the pool and ordering some pizza. By the end of the day we came to realize that... man, we are getting old. Now we find ourselves talking about houses,  fixing things around them, planning rooms for kids in the future, etc. That's part of life, I guess... but still... it's kinda scary.