The following is a small blast of random things sitting around in my head lately.

I knew E3 was coming out on the 360 via the Marketplace (info initially given to me by modeps), but I recently heard that Rez is probably also going to be making an appearance. That is great news for 360 owners who may have never had a chance to play the original on the PS2, as it still holds a special place in my heart and is one of the favorite games of a good friend of mine.

The 1.07 kernel upgrade to the R4 is pointless unless you really want to have support for multiple themes on your cart at one time. There is zero upgrade to the core functionality of the product, and if you do download the “version A” of the kernel you’ll be treated to 12 wildly underwhelming (read: crappy) themes that you would likely never want to actually use. Unless you’re a customization whore who wants to be able to switch out what theme you’re using all the time, my suggestion is don’t bother with the upgrade.

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales is a game that I will play when it comes out, simply because it’s a Final Fantasy title, but really don’t know if it will be any good or not. As yet another FF spin-off title it may prove to just be another cash-in effort, or it could surprise me. From descriptions of gameplay, it seems part WarioWare with a healthy smattering of mini- and micro-games as well as part Yu-Gi-Oh! due to the “Pop-Up Duels” which, when you dig for more info, you discover means the game relies on a card-based battle system. Fingers are crossed but hopes are not yet high.

I’m getting really sick of the WYSIWYG editor that WordPress comes with, as I constantly have issues with P-tags getting screwy on me and a small host of other mildly annoying glitches. Mostly the paragraph breaking bothers me as often on longer posts I will have to look at the frontend of the site, see how the post actually looks, and then go back to edit the post to fix things despite the fact that it looked good in the editor before I made the final publish. I know there are some alternative super-duper-themes like K2 out there, but do they fix issues like this? I can’t believe that I’m the only one out here who has these problems and the theme installed here on BT doesn’t do anything to the CMS, just the design on the front.

Before I knew it, I found myself within 3 months of June 9th… the date of the ACT III, a disc golf tournament I’ve run the past two years and am running again this year. (Don’t mind the content on the site, it’s not yet updated for this year’s event.) Why is this a problem that the tournament is less than 3 months away? Because barring any casual thoughts about what I would like to do this year, and reserving the date with Wickham Park, I haven’t begun actually planning this event. Eep!! I really need to get cranking and start calling up the main sponsors so that I can line up what entry fees will need to be set at, and start taking pre-registrations once those numbers are decided. The tournament does well for itself and I think every year gets a little easier, but I also like to expand what I try and achieve every year as well so that I keep pushing the boundaries of what my players expect from their experience at the event.

Yes, the post title is intentional ;-P

Yesterday the fam took a trip into Hartford for Max’s O’Hartford 5K. The O’Hartford was Jen’s first race post-pregnancy and she had done really well for herself, placing in the top 3 of her age category for the first time since moving to CT (she had done the same a few times before we were married when she lived in Central New York though). The event had kicked off a good year for her, and she was looking to do more of the same again this year: especially with weather in the mid-40′s, it was a good day to take Kayleigh out to watch mommy run. The race was a good time, Jen ended up winning her age category by almost a minute and a half with a 20:55, and I got to drink some Murphy’s on tap while I waited for her to finish the race. That experience was exquisite since I discovered Murphy’s first when I was actually in Cork, Ireland, but since coming back to the states the only other time I have found it has been in cans… as any Guinness fan can attest (or any beer fan, really), beer tastes much better from the bottle than from an aluminum can so when given the choice I will usually pick up Guinness in bottles. Murphy’s on tap, however, has been the best I’ve tasted it since getting it at a true Irish pub in the hometown of the beer. As a quick aside: I do not recommend the Murphy’s Red. I love a good Irish Red as much as the next guy, probably more, but the stuff really is quite bad in my opinion. Then again, what do you expect when it’s actually made by Heineken? Stick with Killian’s.

In other news, The 1.07 kernel is out for the R4. From the sounds of things it doesn’t do much other than allow for more customizations of skins with the ability to also switch between them, but I haven’t installed it myself yet to play around with it.

The last time I had the oil tank at my house filled up, I thought it was strange that I couldn’t find the “gauge” anymore which used to sit on top of the tank. So despite the fact that my tank was full, I had no way of monitoring it from then. Unfortunately the former owners of my house built a fairly tight “enclosure” around the oil tank in my basement, so it’s not really easy to look around at things if something is wrong.

Woke up this morning to my wife complaining that while the thermostat was set to 64 overnight, the temperature in our house was only 60. Despite it being 6:30AM (a time way earlier than I’d rather be up on a Saturday) I trudged into the basement to check things out. Yup, lo and behold, tank is empty. Shit.

Only about 2 hours later and the oil guys were out giving me about half a tank, and when the guy came inside to start the system up again he was able to find the gauge under the tank itself where it had buried itself to. Apparently when the tank was last filled, the plastic gauge was so old and brittle that the incoming pressure caused the thing to just snap and fall off. I’m not too distraught over it though because it seems like it will be easy enough to fix without needing a service guy to come back out again – but I am annoyed that I got whacked for a $100 “emergency fill” fee on top of the cost of the oil itself to get some heat back in my home. *Shrug* I could blame the oil company for the part breaking in the first place, but if I had really dug around I may have been able to find the broken piece before now and had it taken care of before this situation arose. Oh well, qué sera sera, it’s done with now.