Folks have wanted to see what my Wonka costume turned out like, so here's a photo. It turned out pretty well, I think, though the wig and gloves made me super hot (like, the heat was darn close to stifling) and it was sort of a pain to get into and out of - not so great at a party.

Stu went as Bo Peep, and that turned out pretty well. I think the hairy-legs-under-tights is what makes it. Shaved chest, hairy legs. Right on, brotha.

Jenn and Tif looked great in their costumes as well (too bad they don't wear those more often... :) ).

Saturday night was Jason and Tracy's yearly party, which is the shindig to end all shindigs and is looked forward to every year. (It just happened two days ago, and I'm already stoked for next year.) We played our new favorite game - shot checkers (get jumped, take a shot) - and took all Sunday to recover. Great party, though, and I even won best costume.

Today at work is sort of a rinse since everyone wants to come by and see the costume so interruptions are frequent. I got $25 at Barnes & Noble for "coolest costume" at our company contest, which is sweet. Stu got "most original" and got a gift card to a restaurant. Can't beat that!

We shall see what next year has in store. I'd like to get some sort of group costume going, but I'm not sure what we'd all be that folks would recognize.

I finished God of War on Saturday and have come to the conclusion that the concept of "save points" in games is crap.

See, I'm not a very good gamer and I don't have a lot of time. I'm sure there are folks out there who had no problem getting through the ridiculous set of jumping puzzles in hell, which just goes to prove I'm not the greatest gamer. What happened on Saturday, though... grrrrr....

The last battle of the game is with Ares, the God of War. Big surprise from the title of the game, right? Anyway, you fight him and it's pretty difficult but it's not impossible. I lost the battle twice while I figured out how he moved and such, then killed him the third time. For a boss battle, that's pretty good. If I fail about five times on a boss battle, that's okay. Much more than that and I start thinking that maybe it's a little too hard. I mean, I like a good challenge, but I don't want to sit there fighting the same guy all day. I digress.

So I fought Ares and kicked his ass, only to be put into a second "boss battle" where you have to fight a seemingly infinite set of clones of yourself. I think I lost that battle probably 20 or 30 times in a row. Seriously. Fighting Ares before this was a cake walk. But I beat this clone battle, too, and thought, "Yes! I'm done!"

Fighting Ares the first time took about five minutes each battle on average. Losing twice means that battle ran me 15 minutes. 15 minutes after I've already played a bunch, so I'm pretty much done by the time I beat him. But there's no save point, so I can't quit the game after that because then I'd just have to fight him all over.

Fighting the clone battle ran between one and 10 minutes each time. Say that averages out to four minutes each, that means I spent roughly another hour and a half on the second battle. Like I said, not the best gamer, but I am persistent and I do want to win. Plus, I like to play on the "normal" difficulty because "easy" is generally not challenging enough to make me feel accomplished, but "hard" is, well, too hard. So I was playing on "normal" mode.

By the time that clone battle was over, I was frustrated and tired. It was late in the evening, and I just wanted to quit. Where's the save point?

There isn't one.

And you have to fight Ares again, but this time without your weapons.

Now I'm just pissed. After spending another 10 minutes fighting Ares, getting tantalizingly close to winning and then getting the shit kicked out of me, when the game asked me for the umpteenth time whether I wanted to switch to easy mode, I said yes. Then I killed Ares in about two swings of the sword, which was far less than gratifying after all the work I put in, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I was done playing and couldn't just save my progress and stop.

Of course, after the last battle there's a save point, right before you run up some stairs and end the game without fighting anyone. Brilliance, guys.

The point is that I value my time and, while I like gaming, I shouldn't have to be at the mercy of the game developer as to how long I should allocate my time to their game. I can't count how many times I wanted to stop playing but couldn't because I'd just lose my progress. Does that sort of mean the game developer beat me? Sure it does. On the other hand, I'm going to shy away from any game that either employs save points or has levels that take longer than, say, 10 minutes to play. I need to control how my time is allocated and save points don't allow me to do that. It turns the game from being fun into being a chore, and that's not why I play.

Game companies: It's really not that hard. Lose the save points and let me save wherever I want. I promise I'll be more willing to buy your games if you do.

Playing God of War again (still). Learned something from a theological perspective last night: Hell is full of jumping puzzles.

See, I'm to a particular spot where my character, Kratos, has died and is trekking through the underworld trying to get back up to the surface and it seems that there are three major redundant puzzle types I've had to face so far, all of which are reasonably frustrating.

The first puzzle type is the "elevated platform" puzzle. This is where you have a bunch of somewhat randomly placed platforms, all at different heights, that you have to jump across. This puzzle is primarily made difficult by the inability to control the camera, so rather than being able to turn things around and see how high the next platform is or how far away it is, you end up jumping directly into or away from the camera and hoping that you don't die and have to start over.

The second puzzle type is the "log rolling" puzzle. This is where you have a series of platforms that are connected together by logs that spin in an arbitrary direction (sometimes changing direction). The logs, of course, have blades on them - after all, it is hell - and since you can't walk diagonal faster than the logs roll (you'd walk diagonal to both compensate for the rolling nature of the log and move across the log simultaneously, right? like a drill bit...), you end up having to do a series of jumps to cross them. Of course, if you hit a blade, you fall off the log and have to start over.

The third puzzle type, and by far the most infuriating, is the "bladed column climb." This is where you have a huge column broken up into segments, each segment of which spins in alternating directions (so the bottom segment spins to the right but the next segment spins to the left and so on). Each segment also has the prerequisite blades on it. As the columns spin, you have to climb up the column, but if the blades touch you, you fall to the bottom and have to start over. The reason this is so infuriating is the scale of the puzzle - the height of the column is probably 50 times your character's height, and you have to do two of these columns back-to-back. Not only that, but your character doesn't really climb fast enough, so you have to "jump-climb" up the columns (if you jump while you're climbing, you can move a lot faster, but in a more uncontrolled nature). I won't even get into the level of profanity issued from my lips during that ridiculous debacle.

That said, all of that contributes to my firm belief that the rendering of hell is correct - it is, in fact, full of jumping puzzles.

Took Jenn out for a nice dinner at Oba (our favorite restaurant) on Friday night and somewhere between the macadamia nut encrusted swordfish and the Kahlua and cream I asked her to marry me.

We've been together like five and a half years, living together for most of that, so I figured it was probably time. It was a complete surprise to her, which I think is cool. It was a really hard secret to keep - only Stu and my parents knew about it. (Stu even went with me to pick out the ring at The Shane Company, where, by the way, you should do all of your jewelry shopping - they rock.)

She said yes, which wasn't necessarily unexpected but was really nice to hear.

And somehow the restaurant figured out what was going on and comped us our dessert, which was exceptionally thoughtful. I think my new scam might be going from restaurant to restaurant trying to get comped desserts.

No date has been set, no plans have been made. I'll post updates as they become available. (I'm currently a big fan of the Paris Las Vegas Eiffel Tower observation deck wedding...)

I've learned a few lessons from watching others in the last couple of days that I thought may benefit the readers here.

From watching a lady on the news: If a person in a car that almost looks like a cop car (but has no markings) flashes a yellow light at you to pull you over, then comes up to your car in what almost looks like a police uniform (but with no badge or gear and no other markings) and tells you that he's giving you a ticket but you can go ahead and pay him in cash right now if you want... I learned that the person probably isn't a cop and you shouldn't pay him.

From yesterday in line at the lottery ticket machine:

If you try to feed two perfectly crisp new $20 bills into the machine and it won't take them, chances are the machine just doesn't like the new $20s - trying six different $20s in all possible directions isn't going to make the machine like them.

If you have a bill that's run through the wash so many times you can barely make out the print on it, the machine isn't going to take it.

If you have a bill that is missing a huge chunk out of the corner, is nearly torn in half, or has lived its life crinkled into a ball the size of a dime and jammed into the bottom of your purse, the machine isn't going to take it.

If the lottery machine allows you to build up a credit by feeding multiple bills in, you don't need to feed one dollar in at a time and purchase 350 one-dollar tickets. You can do all the bill feeding up front and buy several larger tickets to save time. No, seriously, you can.

If you aren't just buying the random set of lottery numbers and the sheet you've marked your numbers on - which the lottery machine has to automatically scan - is torn, destroyed, or if you decided not to follow the instructions and mark your sheet within the defined lines, the machine isn't going to take it, even if you try to put it in 10 or more times.

(All of these lottery machine lessons were learned from the three-person family immediately in front of me in line.)

Anyway, I hope you can all learn from this. I know it was all very educational for me.

The new version has been released which allows you to provide an optional delimiter parameter for your Join Lines keyboard shortcuts that inserts the provided string between each joined line. Great for joining separate lines into comma-separated lists or providing a space as a delimiter when cleaning up XML elements whose attributes span several lines.

Go get it!

I have a difficult time ponying up $50 for a new game without having played it before, and renting games costs like $7.50 each, after which, if you like it, you still have to come up with $50 to buy the thing.

For those in my boat, check out GameFly - it's like NetFlix, but for games, and you can buy their used games for cheap, cheap, cheap. I bought my copy of God of War from them for $28 - with free shipping - and the cheapest I can find it used is $40 right now. And I'm not even a GameFly member! If you are a member, you can rent the game using your membership and they have a "Keep It" price which is significantly less than the cost of the game new (usually by about $10 at least). For the avid gamer, definitely something to look at.

I played two pretty awesome video games on PS2 this weekend.

I took a significant amount of Friday and played God of War. It's a third-person game where you play a Spartan warrior out to kill Ares, the God of War.

The thing about this game is that it's so visually cool. I mean, your character's moves are cool, the enemies are cool... it's like being part of a very slick interactive movie. It's as fun to watch as it is to play.

I'm not the best game player in the world. I don't have the mental capacity to remember the 47 button combo attack that you have to execute three perfect times in succession to kill this particular boss. I also will never figure out that you have to pick up the helmet from the dead guard three levels back and throw it into the reflecting pool in order to unlock a new weapon. If the battle system is too complex or the puzzles don't make any logical sense, I'm screwed.

Luckily, none of that's a problem here. The puzzles, thus far, are actually reasonably cool. You feel like you solved something neat when you figure out what you're supposed to do. And the enemies? I'm playing on "normal" difficulty, and usually that means I'm hosed. Not so, here - I might have to give it a couple of tries, but I'm able to kill even the biggest bosses without having to know some crazy combo or memorize queued up maneuver sets. (Granted, there are some combos, and knowing those does help you defeat the enemies quicker. But if you want to brute-force your way through, you can, and they don't penalize you for that like most games do.)

I think what I really like about the game is that after you solve a puzzle or defeat a large bad guy, you really do have a pretty decent sense of accomplishment. You come out happy that you won and ready to move on to the next challenge.

The only real issue I have is the lack of camera control. You sometimes can't see where you're going because of bad camera angles, and that's kind of a bummer. That said, for a fixed camera, I've seen way worse, so I can't dock it too much for that.

The save points are spread out quite a bit, too, which means you have to play for a long time in order to get from one save point to the next. That's tough with a busy schedule, which means I may not be able to play as much as I'd like.

The other game I played was Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. Stu came over and we played the "Ko-op" mode (I haven't played the single player mode, so I can't speak to that.)

I like the Mortal Kombat series, though I'm not nearly as avid a fan as Stu is. Plus, they did get a lot into that "gotta remember the bajillion key combo" thing that I was mentioning I hate earlier, so I switched to the Soul Calibur series where the combos made more sense to me and you could still possibly win with a good run of button mashing.

Shaolin Monks adds a cooperative story mode where you and a friend can run around in Outworld, beat up bad guys, and solve puzzles together in an effort to defeat the evil Shang Tsung. As you do that, you gain experience that you can use to buy new combos and moves. (The excuse for the purchasing system is that you are slowly "stealing Shang Tsung's power" and becoming better warriors by doing so. Um, okay.)

The puzzles on this one are a little less clear, but you get no less sense of accomplishment by solving them. The fact that you have to work together makes it even cooler - in some cases, there's no way that one player alone could make their way through the puzzle.

The enemies are difficult, but the fighting is pretty simple to figure out and ends up looking cool quite a bit. Again, a good round of button mashing can get you through, but if you know the combos, you can defeat enemies in a much more efficient manner.

Three complaints on this one.

First, because it's not split-screen, there are some weird camera issues. If you don't stay in pretty close proximity to each other, the camera zooms waaaaaay out on you or you will "disappear" and reappear centered on the screen. The disappear/reappear thing makes it difficult sometimes to move to new areas together because you have to move in concert.

Second, when there are lots of enemies on the screen it becomes really hard to tell where you are. There are lots of times when I thought I was kicking serious ass only to find I was looking at the wrong side of the screen.

Finally, the save points are, again, pretty far apart. We ended up at one point having to just leave the game on pause for an hour while we went out to the store. Lame, people.

An interesting tip for folks playing Shaolin Monks: As mentioned, in order to buy new moves, you have to accumulate experience. The more combo hits you make, the more experience you get. Each new move costs between 1000 and 10,000 experience points to buy. Shaolin Monks adds a new "Ko-op Kombo" where if you and the other player are both hitting the same guy, you both get experience based on the total number of hits.

On the "Living Forest" level, you fight some clay soldiers. The soldiers have shields that make them impossible to hit unless you break them with your "powerful attack" - a "quick attack" has no effect... but it does count toward your combo. Push one of these clay soldiers into a corner and have both players wail on him - with no effect - using the "quick attack." The Ko-op Kombo meter goes up, up, up, and for every, like, 10 total combo hits, you get more experience points. We got the Ko-op Kombo meter up to over 1000 hits (which gives you around 5000 experience every 10 hits) and ended a five-minute ridiculous beat-up session on one guy with over 275,000 experience points, at which point we both bought every single available move to us and still had over 200,000 points left over. Makes the game so you don't have to worry about whether you get the fatality or not; you don't need those piddly 500 experience points anymore.

No, not the Seinfeld episode.

If you haven't seen Serenity, you have to see this movie. Seriously. Don't believe me? Get sucked in by watching the first nine minutes.

I'm wearing my Serenity shirt today (which you can get from Power Star Merchandise), and I'm ready to go see that bad boy again.

Jenn, Stu, Tif, and I went to see Serenity on Sunday.

That is, hands down, the best movie I've seen all year.

In fact, I haven't seen a movie I liked that much in quite some time. Batman Begins was pretty darn good, and I loved Sin City, but Serenity really just roped me in.

If you want to get cliche about it, Serenity is the story of a group of ragtag rebel smugglers who do their best to stick it to the man and barely scrape by on usually illegal jobs. The crew has a particular member on board, though, who is pursued by the government, so the crew has to always stay one step ahead of the law.

But that's so cliche, and it doesn't remotely do the film justice.

Serenity is the film continuation of the [very unfortunately] canceled television series Firefly. You don't have to have watched the show in order to love this movie, though - the movie carries itself, and while it has a few special rewards for the watchers of the show, folks who haven't seen it will still get it... and maybe even a desire to see the rest of the story by picking up the DVDs.

The style of the show (and the movie) is sort of a "Western in space." When I say that, you're going to think of something like Star Trek or what-have-you, and that's not entirely accurate. Think more Western - like, with horses and such. Yeah, that sounds really weird, doesn't it? It works perfectly, though - a lot better than you'd anticipate - and it fits in with the way the universe is laid out (where the interior planets in the system are highly populous and built up, but the planets in the outer rim are still being settled, so they don't have as much technology and so forth).

The film has the perfect mix of action, humor, and emotion, making you totally care about the characters and their adventures, which is well more than I can say about most movies. There are happy moments, there are sad moments, there are funny moments, and there are moments where you just think, "Wow, that was so cool." The funny stuff had the entire theater laughing out loud, which not only made it more fun (because the group was into it), but it also showed that humor can be successfully pulled off in a sci-fi or action film without having to resort to terrible one-liners. (Not to say that there aren't some one-liners, just that they're able to pull it off in this movie.)

I'm reluctant to give too much more than that lest I spoil the plot and the surprises. Suffice to say the cast did a fantastic job, the effects were spectacular, and Joss Whedon not only did his standard fantastic writing job but also proved he can direct. I absolutely cannot wait for a sequel, and rumor has it that if Serenity does well, we may even see that sequel.

It was second in the box office this weekend, which is unfortunate - I'd have liked to have seen it #1. But #2 isn't bad, and hopefully this will send some sort of message to the powers that be that people do care about good story and characters, even if the 'verse is a little eclectic. Go out and see this - it's worth the big screen money - and when it comes out on DVD, get a copy for yourself and one for a friend. It's that good.

After more toil and trouble than I care to recount, my Willy Wonka costume is complete. The last piece I had to finish making was the vest, and now that's done the costume proper is done.

Let's see the costume tally, shall we?

Hat: $14.99
Ribbon for hat band: $3.98
Cane supplies: $70.97
TV Goggles: $14.99
Shirt pattern (estimated): $8.00
Shirt material, findings, etc. (estimated): $30.00
Vest pattern (estimated): $8.00
Vest material, findings, etc. (estimated): $25.00
Chain and findings: $11.97
Pants: Free (had some)
Shoes: Free (had some)
Wig cap: $2.99
Wig: $7.99
Coat: $65.00 + $9.00 shipping
TOTAL: $272.88

Wow. That's a little more than I was planning on spending, but it looks awesome. Plus, it was fun to put together and kept me busy in a creative fashion, so that counts for something, doesn't it?

I don't want the final look getting out quite yet, so I'll post pictures on or after Halloween. I think it looks pretty good, though, and Jenn says so, too.