I am completely out of touch with the current music scene because the only way I get new tunes is via watching So You Think You Can Dance. All I can say is Forever by Chris Brown Rocks!
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wujimon
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wujimon
There are just way too many social networking microblogging choices out there. What is a person to do in light of all the twitter, jaiku, pownce, tumblr choices out there? I guess I made up my own choice by rehashing my wordpress.com blog into the prologue theme to satisfy the urge for micro type blog entries. However, I do have my eyeball on jaiku.. if I ever subscribe to a mobile data plan. And I call myself a techie… lol
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wujimon
On Wed, I started the 100 Push Ups Training Program, but I mixed it up a bit and added some sit-ups and squats to the mix. For fun, I was playing around with Hindu Squats and my wife busted out laughing. I know.. it looks weird, and it hurts my knees so I went back to regular squats and holding stances for the leg workout. The funny thing is that it’s Friday and I am still sore! My wife asked if I was working out yesterday evening and said it’s not good to workout 2 days in a row and that I needed to rest my muscles. She’s gonna be watching me tonight, but this time I am going to drag her into the workout with me!
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wujimon
Scientists found those who drank two or three cups of black tea a day were less than half as likely to exhibit early signs of dementia as those who never or rarely drank it.
– Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Luckily for me, I am a fan of drinking tea. In fact, I will usually drink roughly 3 mugs of tea per day. I start the morning off with some loose leaf green or oolong tea and then will refill the same mug twice in the same day. Personally, I feel that tea tastes better on the second brew
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wujimon
It sounds kind of funny but my wife and I have enabled the World of Warcraft (WoW) Parental Controls on our accounts. Basically, both of us have been feeling a bit burned out by playing WoW. Additionally, we came to the conclusion that WoW has taken up a bit more of our time than we would have liked it to.Normally, I would play about 1.5 hrs/day during the week and 5 hours over the weekend, 10-12 hours of play time a week is not a lot by any stretch, especially compared to some friends of mine who I know play roughly 4 hours a night during the week and 10+ hrs on the weekend (totaling 30 hours a week). But truth be told, 10 hours a weeks is still more than I want to play.
Sure, I could have just used some self control, which I have, but I wanted to take it a bit further and really put the nail in the coffin by enabling parental controls. Basically, when you go to the Parental Controls section of your account, you are presented with the following grid of play schedule parameters:
As you can see, there are some predefined links to Premade Schedules. If I had a school-aged child playing World of Warcraft, I would definitely modify the schedule to be after dinner and up to bedtime or something along those lines. The granularity of being able to define play times within 30 minute increments is great.
So, as you can see from above, I have defined my available play time to be from 7:30pm - 10:30pm during the week and I must log off by midnight on the weekends. Even though I allow myself to play until 10:30pm, I am usually logged off around 9:00 pm as I like to do some taiji and meditation before bed ( visit my taiji blog for more ).
The funny thing was last night after putting my son to bed, both my wife and I tried to log into WoW around 7:15 pm and we were greeted by the parental controls screen upon login, lol… I wanted to get in and run an auction house scan before meeting up with her that night and she wanted to do some banking, but alas we had to wait 15 mins before logging in. No worries for me, as I had some mail to go through.
Also, last night my wife and I were questing together and she was helping out my level 47 priest with her level 70 warlock. It’s actually quite rare that we quest together and it was fun for us to finish quests without the worries of being disconnected from the game due to parental controls. However, it just so happens we finished doing like 5 red quests by around 9:35pm and were both in bed by 10pm.
In any case, I think the Tue/Thurs WoW blackout days are nice and much needed. I will be admit that I was getting a feeling like WoW had some control over me and I was getting upset/frustrated while playing. After all, WoW is a game and should be treated as such. We play to have fun but most importantly, Real Life > Virtual Life.
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wujimon
About a week ago, it got to the point that I was getting pretty upset and frustrated playing World of Warcraft (WoW). The frustration came about during the whole BattleGrounds (BG) grind for honor. The night basically consisted of playing Alterac Valley over and over and over and over and over… The worst games are those in which there is no teamwork and especially if there is no defense as I ALWAYS play D.
Anyhoo.. I logged off that night being upset and a bit angry. The thought of this sounds strange to me because gaming is supposed to be fun. I have played other team-based cooperative games (mostly first person shooter games like Call of Duty, Return Castle Wolfenstein, etc) but never had this sort of feeling in those. Even if we lost the match in the FPS style coop games, I still had a good time.
A couple of months back, I converted a coworker who plays Guild Wars to World of Warcraft. After about a month of playing, he basically told me that WoW rewards people for grinding whereas Guild Wars is more based upon skill. I really didn’t think too much about this comment at the time as I was just a lowly level 44 at the time and still had 30 odd levels before hitting the current level cap, 70. But now that I have hit the level cap, ‘the grind’ is becoming much more apparent to me.
For example, not only was losing a BG making me feel bad, but I also got upset because I *knew* I was a much better PvP player than my opponent and the only way they won was because of gear. The WoW game is heavily dependent upon gear and the only way to get better gear is to put more time into the game. WoW PvP is not like a first person shooter where everyone starts out the same and has an equal chance of getting the uber-gun in the level or taking out another person. Even in Guild Wars, the weapons/armor is mostly cosmetic and the gameplay really comes down to class combination and your choice of 8 spells that you can bring into battle. In both of these examples, I do not necessarily have to put in the time to fair well in a PvP situation. Sure, putting in the time helps to hone the skills, but it is not a requirement.
With all of this, I basically decided to take a break from World of Warcraft. This is the second time that I have taken a break by not playing for roughly a week. Actually, this time the whole grind and time sink issues got to me so bad that I almost deleted my character and called it quits. I probably would have but my wife wanted me to continue playing as we can share the World of Warcraft together.
But alas, during the 1 week break, I stopped playing WoW and caught up on some other neglected chores. Luckily WoW hasn’t impacted my taiji training too much as I do make an effort to stop playing by a certain time so I can get my taiji training in for the day. However, like the last time I took a break I tried to find an MMO replacement. I dabbled in some Guild Wars: Nightfall and Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO).
Guild Wars Nightfall is pretty cool except I feel like I am playing alone since anytime you leave a city you enter an instance of the world for questing. Even though I mostly play solo in WoW, it *is* nice to be amongst the commotion and the hustle and bustle of the world. My wife was very fond of the character creation process in Guild Wars and she ended up creating a couple of character on my account just to check it out. However, one weird thing in Guild Wars is that you cannot jump.. very minor thing but weird nonetheless.
I signed up for the Lord of the Rings Online trial and enjoyed it. The graphics look very nice on my older 2.4Ghz machine but the game felt so similar to WoW that I sort of missed WoW playing it. The art style is more realistic but I favor the WoW look. However, the first couple of quests are intense and quite immersive with the whole story line. Sure, it was basically a ‘go kill 10 rats’ kind of thing but the way they imbedded it within the story and the conflict made it feel different. Also, I would have liked to see more magic type effects in the game, like fireballs and stuff, but it’s pretty subdued. Not LOTRO’s fault as I think Tolkien kept it on the downlow. In the end, I do not want to have another timesink trying to build reputation or kill 100 rats so I can be the king of rats or whatever.
So, after all of this, I basically ended up going back to WoW. However, now I play very sparingly and only when I am having fun. Example, last night I played the daily battleground and 1 match of Alterac Valley then logged. Short and sweet as I know there is nothing but grind ahead of me if I want to do more. I do notice my interest in the game has really taken a dive and at this point I am not sure if I would continue to subscribe when approached with the next billing cycle.
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wujimon
My son and father-in-law have been playing Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Wii together. It’s quite a funny and cute sight to see them sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of the TV playing a video game. At first, it was my son taking charge of the 2nd player to assist in stopping enemies and gathering stars. However, over time, he now wants to control the 1st player Wiimote . When this happens, his responsibility is to jump while my father-in-law controls the movement with the nunchuck analog stick.
Just recently, my son began getting quite scared and frightened with the influx of ‘bad monsters’ on the screen. He especially gets a bit stirred up during boss encounters. Last night, it go so bad that my wife had to jump in and take over the 2nd player wiimote to assist in the boss battle.
The weird thing is that the whole ’scariness’ aspect seems rather recent. For example, he used to never be scared of the dark but now he is. He used to never talk about monsters but now he does. At first we attributed it to conversations with classmates at daycare, but perhaps there’s something more. Maybe before he wasn’t really processing the data and making the connections, but now he is?
