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I went to Oxford with Jean, Joel, and Derek to watch the Egg Bowl on Saturday. The was the first Egg Bowl that I had been to since 1997, which was the last time it was played on a Saturday before this year. MSU lost the game 20-3. It was a game of missed opportunities by MSU on both sides of the ball. Ole Miss gave us many chances to win that game, but we blew it. Not only that, it was cold and rainy during the entire game. It wouldn’t be an Egg Bowl without miserable weather. As soon as the game ended, the sun came out and it was pretty nice. At least basketball season is here.

I’m thinking about getting a new video card. I haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on in that market recently. I want to stay under $300, but I also want good performance. I think my best bet is a Geforce FX 5700 or a Geforce 6 6600. My current card is an Asus card, and I really like it.

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. For various reasons, I didn’t go home this year. This was the first time in all my years that I wasn’t home for Thanksgiving. Oh well, next year I’ll probably be far from Jackson and won’t be able to go home then either.

The weather took another turn for the cold yesterday. Today I turned the heater on for the first time. Winter is coming.

A group led by The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility released a list of the Ten Most Violent Video Games as a warning to parents for the upcoming holiday shopping season. They are:
1. Doom 3
2. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
3. Gunslinger Girls 2
4. Half Life 2
5. Halo 2
6. Hitman: Blood Money
7. Manhunt
8. Mortal Combat
9. Postal 2
10. Shadow Heart

I have 3 of these games and plan on getting 2 more soon. You can read the official press release here.

As an alternative, they recommended 9 non-violent video games. They are:
1. Antigrave
2. EyeToy
3. Jak 3
4. Karaoke Revlution Vol. 3
5. Madden NFL 2005
6. Mario Power Tennis
7. Prince of Persia
8. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3
9. SimCity 4

I only have 1 of these and don’t plan on getting any others. You can read that statement here.

Dave Chappelle is my favorite comedian these days. I watch his TV show and hopefully I’ll get to see him in person one of these days.

Around the beginning of September I saw him on The Tonight Show promoting his new comedy special. They talked about how he lives on a farm near Dayton, which is were I spent my summer. He has a neighbor that does most of the real work on the farm. I did some searching on the net and discovered that the farm is in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I actually did some biking out there the weekend before I left. It turns out that he was spotted in Dayton at Best Buy and Meijer about 2 weeks after I left. I wish I had known that he lived there when I was in Ohio. I wonder how quickly I would’ve gotten arrested or shot if I had shown up on his property

There’s an article in MSU’s student newspaper,The Reflector, about the midnight release of Halo 2 last week at the local GameStop in Starkville. Apparently they had 2 armed ROTC guards with rifles there to make sure there wasn’t any trouble. As far as I know there wasn’t any. Seems a little extreme though.

After a night of heavy drinking, I find that I need 3 things: a few glasses of water, a decent meal, and a BM. After I’ve had those, I feel better in about an hour or two. Friday night was fun, but because of that early Saturday wasn’t.

The shifts in the temperature around here has also made me sick, literally. Most of the weekend was spent playing Everquest. I have to get back to more important things this week.

Oh well, today is payday. And the next weekend will be here soon enough.

Electronic Arts, the world’s largest third-party video game publisher, is in a little trouble. Yesterday, this Livejournal blog entry by the spouse of an EA worker started a buzz on the internet. She was unhappy with EA’s unfair treatment of its workers. During crunch time, they are expected to work at least 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. They get no overtime pay or additional days off for doing this.

I’ve known that in the software development industry, it’s expected that you work long hours during crunch time. I had heard that the video game industry was exceptionally harsh, but this is worse than I expected. I read some of the responses to the blog entry yesterday, and it seems like not all of EA is like that. And of course, not all video game companies are like that.

Now it appears that EA could be facing a class action lawsuit because of the unpaid overtime pay. I wonder how this will turn out.

Over the summer I went through part of the interview process with EA. I submitted my resume so that I could be considered for a position with their sports division in Orlando. They sent me a written test to fill out. I guess I did well on the test because they wanted a phone interview a couple of weeks later. The phone interview didn’t go so well, so I’m still here in Starkvegas. It would interesting to see how things are inside EA right now.

It looks like my favorite mp3 software, WinAmp, is effectively dead. All the members of the original team have left parent company AOL and who knows if it’ll be updated in the future.

WinAmp has been my choice since I first started listening to mp3′s. So what do I go with now? iTunes? MusicMatch? RealOne Player? Windows Media Player? I guess I’ll give some of them another chance or just stick with the current version of WinAmp.

You can read the story about it here.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released yesterday, so go try it out. It looks like the traffic to their website has slowed down since yesterday. You might want to uninstall any old copies first. Just leave the directory intact.