Went to Reactor 2006 over the weekend. Man! Hope this makeup comes out!

Just got back from Otakon and boy are my arms tired! :P

I wonder if anyone uses their Slashdot Journals anymore in this age of blogging. It's like everyone and his grandma is running a blogging service of one kind or another.

Well, I finally got one of these blog things the kids today rave about, all thanks to Slashdot! I found out about a variety of self-hosted blog packages after a /. story featuring a comprehensive blog comparison matrix. So I ended up installing Nucleus.

I was so inspired by this that in a rage of creativity I also remade my main website into more of a games storefront and pushed the development stuff to the back. The storefront is a PHP-Nuke module I wrote that calls Amazon.com web services using PHP. I had a lot of fun putting this together!

http://www.proliphus.com (press the blog button)

or

http://sites.proliphus.com/blueZhift/blog/

After what seemed like an eternity, Final Fantasy XI Online is in the house! The installation and set up of the hard drive was pretty easy. And I really love the background music that accompanies the menu screens.

One thing I immediately noticed was far greater use of multimedia candy in setup screens and such. I definitely like it!

As for the game itself, I've only played maybe 3 or 4 hours at this point mostly taking in the sights and learning my way around. I got the impression that a lot of the new PS2 players may not be playing with USB keyboards because chatting with other n00bs like me didn't evoke many timely responses...or maybe it was my breath!

It'll be interesting to see how this develops. I'm really pulling for Sony and Square that this will be a big success. So far, I'm having a lot more fun here than I did on EQ or SWG! Ugh! Still 10 more hours before I can play again!

Arghh! My poor wallet! There are too many good games coming out this year!

Right now I'm counting down to Final Fantasy XI for PS2. After much thought I decided to go with the PS2 version because upgrading my console is cheaper than upgrading (ie rebuilding) my PC. Besides, playing in the living room is sooo much more fun.

Later this year, hopefully Gran Turismo 4 will make its appearance stateside. Along with all of the expected eye candy, I'm looking forward to racing minivans! Yep, I heard minivans will be in there too. I'm just waiting for the NASCAR Better Homes and Gardens Cup Minivan Championship now...:-) In the meantime, maybe I'll take Need for Speed Underground for a spin.

Oh, is that my XBox screaming for Knights of the Old Republic? Could be... I generally like to stretch my purchases out over time, but there's just too much out there now. Man, my wife's gonna kill me!

Dale Jarrett wins the Budweiser Shootout, at last the NASCAR season has begun! Oh yeah! :-)