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My reading list is growing. Right now I’m reading Black House by Stephen King. Here are a list of books and stories that I plan on reading soon. I’m not sure what order I’m going to read them in. I think I need to take a break from Stephen King for a while, so Dreamcatchers may be one of the last ones.

• Dreamcatchers, Stephen King
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
• Summer of the Monkeys, Wilson Rawls
• The Hedge Knight, George R.R. Martin
• The Sworn Sword, George R.R. Martin
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• Timeline, Michael Crichton

I finally got around to trying Warioware: Smooth Moves this afternoon. It’s a lot of crazy, fast-paced fun. There are so many games that you can play and from what I’ve heard I haven’t even come close to seeing them all. I had heard that the multiplayer mode isn’t available in the beginning. I think that all I need to do to unlock it is complete the single player mode.

I think I first heard about a movie called The Promise on Filmspotting. I watched it today and I thought it was awesome. If you liked Hero and House of Flying Daggers, then I recommend giving this one a try.

This is my first entry using the Wii. It may be the last.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came out on the virtual console this week. It’s the one I’ve been waiting for the most. Mario Kart 64 comes out on Monday and Super Mario World may be soon. Awesome!

The News Channel went live yesterday, which is one day earlier than scheduled. I’m a news junkie, so I’ll probably be using it some. I hope they rolling out new stuff for us to play with.

My arm hurts. Later.

Word came out last week that HBO has acquired the TV and film rights to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It’s currently my favorite ongoing series. It even inspired the name of this website.

Turning a series like this to film presents some problems. Do they make a miniseries or movie based on one book or do they combine several books? The books are so long and jam-packed that a lot would be lost in either case. I think they have come up with a great solution. They are making it a TV show and each season of the show will cover one book in the series. Why has no one tried this before? I’m sure it’s a long way off, but I’m excited.

Today I played Trauma Center: Second Opinion on the Wii for a little while. I rented it from Gamefly. You start out as a surgeon early in his career and you move your way up through the ranks as you complete surgeries. I’ve had to cut people open, remove pieces of glass and tumors, stitch them back together, and bandage them up. The hospital/medical terminology is at least a little familiar to me, probably because I watched ER for years. So far it’s fun, though a little creepy.

Maybe next somebody will make a plastic surgeon game where you have to perform cosmetic surgery on people.

Lately I had noticed that it took a really long time to create new entries. Last week I started getting that 500 Internal Server Error whenever I tried to add a new entry or rebuild pages. The error logs said something like “premature end of script headers”. Working with the tech support guys at the hosting company wasn’t much help. If you noticed a lot of “test” entries over the weekend, that was us trying to figure something out. I use the free version of Movable Type, so I don’t think I could’ve gotten any help from them. In the end I figured that it may have something to do with how long it was taking for the script to execute.

A couple of days ago I discovered that Movable Type 3.34 would be released any day now. The release notes promised a performance increase of up to 15 times faster. I installed it today. I tried rebuilding the site and the process is sooo much faster than what is was before. So far I’m not getting any errors. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

&tI think I may be one of the people that get Wii elbow or whatever you want to call it.

I finally got through the first dungeon on Twilight Princess the other day. It took me about 3 hours to get from the beginning to the end, though I did take a couple of breaks while I was doing it. I think this is going to be a long, fun game.

I downloaded Super Mario Bros., Altered Beast, and Dungeon Explorer from the Virtual Console. Retro fun! I’m excited about some of the games that are going to be on the VC soon, but I’m still wondering when we’ll see Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and A Link to the Past.

I rented Trauma Center: Second Opinion for the Wii from Gamefly and it should be here any day now.

Last week I reserved Wii Play mostly because it comes with a Wii Remote. Those remotes cost $50 by themselves and they are hard to find around here. I don’t think they’re taking anymore reserves on that game. It’ll be out in about a month.

Today I reserved a copy of Warioware: Smooth Moves and it will be out next week. It seems like it could be a cool party game. I don’t know much about it so I’m taking a leap of faith. If only I already had that second controller.

The GameStop employees seem cooler these days, so I’m happy to hook them up with some reserves. I know that there are some new people there and some old people are gone, but part of it may be because the Christmas season and the PS3/Wii launch are over.

I get these urges to get back into online game every once in a while. I thought about getting my Xbox Live subscription started again, but they just don’t have any games I want to play. Now I really think I want to play City of Heroes again. We’ll see what happens with that.

So with all this going on I don’t need to buy any more games between now and the end of the decade.

Wow! There was a plane crash near the Jackson/Clinton border yesterday. It went down less than half a mile a mile from my mom’s house – where I spent a lot of my early years. My mom heard it and called me afterward.

I had a lot of fun with the Wii last night. I played the tennis, baseball, and boxing parts of Wii Sports and they were pretty cool. I messed around with a lot of stuff on the menu, created a Mii, etc. I was able to browse longklaw.com using the browser that you can download. My friend number is 1875 7438 9934 0398. I purchased Super Mario Bros from the Virtual Console and plan on giving it real try tonight. I had the most fun playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I wish I had gotten a Wii while I still had time left in my break and not on the first day back to work. Oh well. There’s always the weekend.

I got a gym membership again today. I’m not even going to try to plan a schedule because I know I won’t stick to it. I just want to go and do something a few times a week.

I saw the series premiere of Dirt on FX the Tuesday night. Those commercials that I’ve been seeing over the past few months got on my nerves. I had heard that early reviews of the show were bad, but I was surprised at how much I liked it. It was fun and mean and crazy. Maybe it goes downhill from there. I really don’t need another TV show to keep up with.

I ordered HBO because Rome starts back on the 14th of this month and The Sopranos will be back in April. A benefit is that on the various HBO channels they’ve been playing a lot of movies that I’ve been interested in.

I’m not sure that I mentioned it earlier, but around Thanksgiving I bought Wii component cables so that the picture will look better.

Yesterday I went to GameStop in Starkville just to browse like I frequently do. I overheard an employee say that they had been sent three Wiis and they might be receiving the Wiis today. I was really tired at work this morning and my back was killing me, so I went home for a little while to rest. Around noon I went out to run some errands. I went to GameStop with the intention of seeing how many they got (I assumed they would have already sold out of the ones they received) and when they might be expecting some more. A spiffy GameStop employee told me that the UPS man was running late and they hadn’t received their shipment for the day. I decided that since I had already been gone from work for 2 hours at this point I might as well try to wait it out even though I had told myself I wasn’t going to wait in line anymore. Since no one else in the store appeared to be waiting around for the truck, I knew that if the Wiis came today, I would be sure to get one since 3 supposedly were coming.

A few other people showed up to wait for the UPS truck while I was there, but I don’t think they all stayed. For some reason I had a good feeling about actually getting a Wii today, but I was prepared to be disappointed. I guess it was around 1:30 that I saw a UPS truck at the bank near Wal-Mart across the street and soon afterward it came to the shoe store next to GameStop and then to GameStop. There was one lady who went out to the UPS truck while the delivery guy was inside the truck preparing the boxes. I’m assuming she was just trying to find out how many Wiis he had and not trying to do anything underhanded. Once the delivery guy came off of the truck and I saw how many boxes he had and the size of the boxes, I knew that I was going home with a Wii. When I came into the store the employees could tell that they had 3 Wiis and 1 PS3 just by looking at the boxes.

I didn’t really care that I was first to buy one as long as I was one of the three. Everybody seemed to realize who the first three were and I would have been highly upset if somebody tried to take my spot among the 3. The UPS guy stated for the benefit of the people who weren’t going to be able to get one that he had just unloaded 22 Wiis at Wal-Mart, but they might not make them available until tomorrow. The spiffy GameStop employee had gone to Wal-Mart and returned in the meantime and said that he saw somebody walking out with one. I’m assuming there was a reason he didn’t share that information with us sooner lol. A couple of people immediately left and I hope they were able to get one. A ponytailed GameStop employee pointed at me and said that he knew that I was first, so I went up to buy mine. The spiffy GameStop employee brought the 3 units out and then ponytail guy rang me up. Ponytail guy asked me if I wanted some games, and I told him that I already a game – I just didn’t have a system.

I got back at work around 2 and now I can’t wait to get home to play with my Wii. It’s going to be fun. I may be working late today, but when I finally do get to play, it’s going to be fun. I just hope I break something or hurt anybody.