Ok, so what's been going on around here. It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting outside with one eye on the girls in the spa and one eye on this. I keep having to stop and help them put the face masks on for diving. I'm trying to get them used to swim gear early so they hopefully will get into snorkling and scuba diving when they get older. Zoe can snorkle already.

It's my parents 39th anniversary today and we'll be heading over to see them this afternoon. 39 years. That's a long time. Happy anniversary Mom & Dad. For the life of me, I can't figure out what to ge them. Over the last few years we've run the technological gamut with new TVs, DVD players, and even a Tivo. There's nothing new to get them...

I've been doing a little more gaming recently, much to Michele's chagrin. She went out on Friday night with Jenny and was suprised that when she got home post midnight I was still up 'killing Nazis'. It was actually nice to have quiet chat at 1 AM. To bad we realized in 5 short hours the children would stir and one of us had to get up with them. Life is short, stay up late.

Last week I had spent some time downloading and patching Neocron. Yoshi at work suggested I give it a try. After downloading over 1 gig I booted the game it patched over night. The next day I tried to play and was completely clueless. It's first person shooter style, but the controls use the arrow keys instead. After trying to understand what's going on, I realized there was too steep of a learning curve. I read the FAQ and found out there was a single player tutorial version. After a quick 100 meg d/l, I was in tutorial mode and it all made sense. I went back and played a bit of the multiplayer and it appears to me that it's kinda like Deus Ex online. Lots of running back and forth figuring out how to solve things. The combat is simple and unrewarding. It doesn't appear that traditional FPS skills are of benefit in Neocron. It's a lot of 'aim in the general direction of the enemy and shoot with your biggest weapon'. I'm minimizing it a bit and I'm sure rabid Neocron fanboys would jump down my throat. The game does look cool as a MMORPG, but it's not competitive with Quake & Unreal level FPS games. I'm sure a ton of people will play the game, but I'm not sure I want to spend a bunch of time in the resource gathering mode.

While I was on Fileplanet, saw a game called Battlefield 1942 as a demo download. I had seen mention of the game on the genmay.com message boards earlier but wasn't sure what it was. I d/led and installed the game. All I can say is Wow! It's a multiplayer team based FPS but in the tradition of Team Fortress and Wolfenstein, but this game takes it to a new level. Perhaps it could be called 'WWII Online, done right'.

The game rocks because besides being able play the foot soliders gunning down the enemy with small arms, you can take over any gear in the game. Any gear. You can drive the aircraft carrier, the tanks, the APCs, aim and fire the gun emplacements, AA guns, landing craft, etc.

It's a blast. It ships in 15 days on September 10th, and I'm all over it. Give it a try.

OK, I was going to try to update about geocaching and my toe nail, but I need to go do some work outside. More later as I find time.