Empire at War!

Ok, so no, I wasn't too thrilled when I first tried out SW: Empire at War. For some reason, it just seemed a lot harder than WC3. There is a ton of multitasking which, as I've mentioned somewhere before, I'm horrible at doing. I don't multitask. If I do, it is the bare minimum of what could be considered multitasking!

Now that time has passed, I've retried, several times, SW: EaW, and have now found that it has grown on me. So far I've only played the easy lvl, which is still hard to me. After many trial and errors of how to play the game, I've finally managed to beat the ai. It's a very simple way to beat it actually.

No, I will not spoil it by telling you what to do, unless you ask and want me too. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to playing it more now. I'm doing a lot of single campaigns so I can get used to the gameplay more for the day we all play that when we want to play something different than WC3! Go buy it!

The graphics remind me of Command & Conquor for some reason. I do like that you can zoom in and out on the land battles, though it isn't really that usefull other than to look at the action up close and personal. I still find it difficult to watch in the cinematic mode because you can't control your troops there, only watch them, which could be bad if the battle turns against you. Of course all you have to do is get out of the cine mode and take back control, but that's annoying. Cinematic works best for me in space battles, for when your force (haha, get it?)is big and strong enough, all you have to do is watch your fleet destroy the rebel scum! I mean the Empire... yeah.

One great thing when you are the Emire, and I'm sure it's the same with the Rebels when I do that one, at least in single campaign mode, is when you are controlling Darth Vader, or even the Emperor. You can almost use them to clear the entire map! Yes, they are that powerful! One key factor to it though is to make bacta tanks. If not, yer toast! Why the Sith need to sit in a bacta tank and Obi Wan doesn't you may ask? Well, choose yer path and find out!

Choose your destiny...

Krudd

Now that's a spider!

Saturday after work, I went over to a friends place to play a lil WoW when we were distracted by a rather large spider. Normally, I don't go into the yard, but this time he asked if I could help him out a bit with the sprinkler system. There were a lot of weeds and vines, and not really thinking about it, I reached into the growth and started turning knobs and looking for pipes.

Imagine my surprise after the water turned on and out comes this spider! I was creeped out as it was as big as my thumb! We tried looking for it on the web, as in www on the net :), but didn't find the specific spider in the yard. For not being a tarantula, that was the biggest spider I've ever seen!

Krudd

FiOS

I finally have the opportunity to get FiOS installed at my house. FiOS is Verizon's fiber optic connection to your house, which historically has been the last piece of the telecommunication company's digital chain. The telco's have almost all converted to pure digital equipment over the last 20 years, but the local loop to your house is still copper which explains why DSL speeds are relatively slow.

The advantage of fiber is that I can order their FiOS Internet service that gives me faster upload and download speeds than my current Adelphia (soon to be Time Warner cable) connection, all at a lower price. Packages for FiOS start at $34.95/month for a 5 Mbps/2 Mbps download/upload connection. Contrast this with my Adelphia connection of 4 Mbps/400 Kbps at $47.99 a month. They have a "sweet spot" rate of 15 Mbps/2 Mbps at $44.95 which I'm still debating on getting.

The reviews are generally good but one negative is that since they replace your local copper loop you can no longer use your analog phone lines in case of a blackout. Instead it relies on a battery backup which is supposed to give you 4 hours of emergency phone use in the event of a power outage. However since your regular phone service is now pure digital the quality of regular voice calls is supposed to be better.

Installation is free if you sign up for a year otherwise it's a still reasonable $69.99. It's been estimated that the actual installation price is $500 but Verizon is eating this cost in order to get into the television/internet/phone combo market.