A new arrival and Death Matching....

For those who haven't heard the news, Sivart and his wife had a bouncing baby boy last week. His name is Aiden (or Nedia, I guess) and following a short phone call after the birth and a phone call from Sivart's mother, Sivart has fallen off the face of the Earth.

It may be years before Sivart resurfaces. So if anyone wants Sivart's address to send over some cute University of Kentucky Wildcats baby clothes and toys, just email me and I'll get you the info.

Tee Hee!

I haven't blogged in a while since I've been working on a great little project for work that I now don't even wish to speak about at this point, but I should get back into the flow off things now. I believe that Merlin and French Toast are making their way back up here to the OC for Thanksgiving and hopefully we'll check out a movie or two. At least one UK basketball game.

I spoke with Merlin last night as he was unable to get Quake 4 to run on his computer. Apparently, Merlin went from not having gamed in 5 or 6 years to purchasing games that are on the bleeding edge of technology without upgrading his computer system first.

That being said, I did a little research on a new web site that I saw advertised on TV. It is linked in the title and it's called gametap.com. This website has thousands of games available to play via the internet as long as you have a broadband connection.

Merlin and I talked about the good old days when we had a small 4-5 PC network to deathmatch with and how it would be great to be able to do that every now and again. Well, this new website will make that somewhat possible. I did see some PC games that were big back in the day so we'll be able to do this someday. Of course, they'll have to figure out how to support Mac's first, but they know they need to get on that.

Talking about the network gaming reminds me of one of our funniest stories involving Merlin and a little game called Counter-Strike. Piccu and Merlin were the evil terrorists and myself and Sleeping Boy were the anti-terror authorities sent to destroy them.

Sleeping Boy and I had come around to the front of the house where Merlin and Piccu were holding the hostages. While Piccu was hiding with the hostages, Merlin thought he would get on the roof and get the drop on us as we worked our way around.

Merlin was roughly 3 stories high on top of this house and as soon as he saw us he opened fire. I was the closest to him with Sleeping Boy behind some rocks to my left. I was armed with only a shotgun and a pistol which didn't help me much since I was out of range with the shotgun.

So Merlin was at the edge of the roof when he opened up and Sleeping Boy and I let the bullets fly. I don't know what Sleeping Boy had, but it was an automatic sub-machine gun of some sort and I emptied my shotgun peppering Merlin before switching to my pistol.

The great thing about Counter-Strike and most first person shooter games is that if you get hit, it will move you around. So if you get hit in the left shoulder, you will spin in that direction.

Merlin was spinning wildly in all different directions since we were shredding him with lead. But we were so far away from him being so high up that we couldn't kill him. I guess he had body armor on. Anyway, while he was spinning around trying to reorient himself to shoot at us, he got a little too close to the edge and Sleeping Boy shot him off of the roof where he fell to his death.

I had emptied my pistol and got to witness the carnage after I reloaded and stepped out to open fire again. What made his great was hearing Merlin scream and yelp like a like a little girl in the other room as we unloaded on him.

Deathmatching is a nice stress reliever. You get to run around and release your frustrations with large caliber assault weapons and explosives killing your friends.

What's not to like?

I'm hoping that I'll be able to get into gaming a little more through GameTap.com as soon as they come up with some stinkin' Mac support. That is ultimately the only problem with Macs is that gaming is way behind despite the fact that Mac a 100 times more stable than Windows-based PCs. That and you have to spend a couple of grand for one capable of playing games like Quake 4. Even though Quake 5 will be out about the same time that Quake 4 is made available for the Mac.